Bobby Zhao

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Bobby Zhao
Design Strategist

Catree

Designing your own cat furniture, gamified

Catree is a personal project that offers a unique creative experience for average pet owners to design their own sculptural cat furnitures and bring them to life.

Time

2022

Responsibilities

Product Design, UIUX

Interactive Design Tool helps capture market

The Catree application, aside from being a key design tool to make the creation process more accessible, is also a business strategy to upscale user base. It is able to address the following pain points that no existing product can resolve simultaneously:

Behavioral Fit - Customize to All cat owners know each cat has their own peronality, habits, and how they want to play. The owner knows the best, their beloved cats deserve tailored made entertainment space.

Flexible Footprint - For rooms of all sizes and shapes, for eg not matter if your living room is circular, rectangle, or has beam.

Personalized Aesthetics - Best suited for the cat owner’s taste and current home decor/interior design

The WHO reports 4.5 billion people lack access to essential health services.

Design System

I started with investigating the user experience from existing modeling softwares/video games. Despite the versatility of the professional modeling softwares, most people from a non-designer background I interviewed found the interface to be daunting and confusing. Building-based video games, despite its creative limitation compared to modeling softwares, are able to give users a great sense of satisfaction and creative accomplishment without scaring them off with the steep learning curve.

Lower learning curve

Higher learning curve

Survey

Prior to in-depth one-on-one interviews,

Literature Review Highlights

Build Setup

Catree offers three scales of setup: showroom size, furniture size and standard cat tree size. The variation offers users the flexibility to determine the physical footprint. Choosing different build sizes also affects the grid setup in the digital workspace.

Building Foundation

Foundation modules provide the necessary enclosure for cats and support for upper levels. Due to its strucutural function, foundation module has its own catalog in the build menu.

Catree offers a wide range of material selections for both exterior finishes and upholstery, to accomodate users’ various taste.

Surface Puncture for cat accessibility

As an architecture for cats, Catree’s movement circulation is vertical and accessibility to upper levels is achieved through porosity in the surfaces.