Purrfect Match

Purrfect Match log-in page
Chat with the shelter owners to set up playdates!
Browse through the profiles curated by local animal shelters

Inspiration

Seeing the Life of Kai presentation, we were inspired to do something for animals in need. We explored their website and stumbled upon Snowy and Dusty’s story, where they were sent to animal rescues and continuously rehomed. To avoid this, we wanted to come up with a solution that could decrease animal rehoming by ensuring that owners knew about their compatibility with a shelter animal and its traits before bringing it home. In addition, we wanted to make it fun in order to encourage people to adopt instead of shopping for their companions, especially when animals who deserve a second chance are being put down in shelters every day.

What it does

Inspired by dating apps which aim to match compatible people based on profile information, our app aims to reduce the number of animals needing to be rehomed by matching them with owners they are more likely to find forever homes with. They will be able to scroll through the different animals in shelters in their area to view their compatibility, traits, and environments they thrive in. They can send them hearts and nudge them to ask the shelter for a playdate before adoption. Our prototype outlines the structure of the app and its main features.

How we built it

The app prototype was built in Figma. The webpage prototype was coded in HTML and CSS.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge we ran into was making this a distinct app that solely helped out shelter pets find a home. When we were pitching our idea, a lot of people were stuck on the fact that we were designing a play on a dating app, bringing up issues of only the cutest pets getting adopted. We wanted to curate our app prototype so that it had more of an homage to dating apps and not an exact replica of one. We also ran into issues of creating the code and designing some of the graphic elements, but most of these issues were overcome within the time we had.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re all beginners to the technology that we used in this hackathon, so we’re proud of the learning we were able to do and the product that we were able to put up with time restraints and little experience.

What we learned

We learned a lot during this process! One of our main takeaways was to be ok with not everything being perfect- we had to scrap a lot of good ideas due to time and ability. We also perfected our Figma skills.

What's next for Purrfect Match

The majority of our app and the pages/features we wanted to include are still in the prototype phase. We will continue to develop the software for our app to have a fully functioning product. Our prototype also focuses on the pet owner’s end, so we will continue to develop features for shelter organizers to easily view owner profiles and match their pets with loving owners. To add on, we will implement our Save a Life section, which lets the user swipe through shelter animals that are about to be put down to give them one last chance.