Having used a variety of cycling, walking and other activity applications on my phone, I had some ideas of what I liked, what I felt they were lacking and what I thought I would value in an application.
I tabled the idea, working on other apps that would provide elements of the activity application, but sat on the idea while I thought about what it might need.
Finally opportunity presented itself, and I was able to start development on what is now BearVelo, an application for tracking outdoor activities.
Where does pet walking come in? Well let’s call this the evolution of ideas. With a focus on personal activities in the application, I would typically implement some feature or change, do some initial review in a simulator, and then use it to record my own activities.
For me, my own daily activities include taking my dog Annie out for a walk every morning. A perfect time to record an activity, see how the app is progressing and expose issues in activity tracking (you’d be surprised how much is exposed when you don’t actually walk in a human manner, and are frequently stopping to sniff things).
As this progressed I realized I was starting to monitor my dogs activities as well as my own, reviewing her activity and wanting to separate it from my own. Which brings us to ‘pet walking’ (and pet running, as well as child walking). As part of that new types of activities have been introduced into the app to track pet and child activities. Future releases will expand these areas with the ability to review your pets progress in addition to your own. I may even break this out with more specific pet monitoring, or at least introduce more pet oriented tracking.
Where this will go and how the features will evolve we’ll see, but it shows that you often have one idea in mind and how someone will use a product, only to find that there are other opportunities and places where features have value.
Oh, and if you need some more motivation to get out there with your pet (and record it in BearVelo :)), here’s a couple of links to walking tips.
https://www.thewildest.com/dog-lifestyle/10-dog-walking-tips-everyone-should-know
https://www.petpartners.com/blog/new-pet-owners/4-reasons-to-get-outside-and-walk