SyncUP PETS

⭐️ 4.6 App Store Rating | 40K+ Users | iOS - Android 

Company:  T-Mobile
Duration:  Approximately 1 year
Team:  PETS Design Team
My Role:  UX Designer L3

Case Study: Where’s My Dog?

Designing peace of mind for pet parents—fueled by love and LTE.

Overview

Old design, new tricks: Enhancing the SyncUP PETS UX

As a UX Designer on the SyncUP PETS team, I partnered with a small crew of developers and product managers to improve T-Mobile’s first IoT-connected pet tracking product. Our UX team? Just two designers—but we moved fast, collaborated tightly, and shared one mission: make the app more lovable, reliable, and user-friendly.

Working closely with dev leads, I tackled several of the most urgent UX pain points—helping refine the product experience, streamline setup, and build trust with pet parents through better design.

Problem Solving With Paws

Helping SyncUP PETS deliver peace of mind—despite hardware hurdles.

As T-Mobile’s first IoT-connected pet product, SyncUP PETS offered real value to users—but critical UX issues were limiting adoption and satisfaction. Executive leadership flagged key experience problems that required immediate improvement:

• Hardware limitations led to confusion around battery levels
• The onboarding flow was overly complex, causing user frustration and drop-off
• Pet profile creation felt optional due to its length and placement in the flow
• Additional features were requested to boost perceived value and retention
• Platform constraints demanded that certain setup steps be completed properly for the app to work as intended

Working alongside another UX designer and the product team, I led design updates that directly addressed these challenges—streamlining the experience while respecting technical constraints.

⬆️  Above - The Latest version of the original SyncUP PETS app with the 1st generation PET tracker hardware.

Leading the UX Vision

My core role: refining critical pet-parent journeys and boosting usability one paw-step at a time.

As a UX Designer on the PETS team, I collaborated with product and engineering teams while contributing directly to critical feature redesigns and onboarding improvements.

My contributions included:

• Redesigning the onboarding flow to streamline setup and reduce friction
• Revamping the pet profile experience to simplify the process
• Designing custom icons to clarify battery status and reduce confusion
• Creating Lottie JSON animations for onboarding and app tours
• Contributing to user research and synthesis to inform feature direction
• UX designer on the Health Journal feature 

This project required thoughtful iteration and attention to micro-interactions—balancing intuitive design with the emotional needs of pet owners. My work helped transform the app into a more lovable, usable product experience. 🐾

The Work in Action

From wireframe paws to final product 

As a UX Designer on the PETS team, I led key redesign efforts across onboarding, profile setup, and iconography—translating user needs into clear, lovable UX improvements backed by research and real feedback.

Onboarding Updates

Streamlining setup while respecting hardware limits

I optimized the original onboarding flow within the constraints of hardware and platform limitations. Certain steps—like connectivity checks and permissions—were unavoidable, but I redesigned the experience to let background processes run in parallel while users completed their pet profile and setup.

Despite tight deadlines and fixed tech limitations, the result was a faster, smoother onboarding flow.
Below is the final UX flow overview.

Pet Profile Updates

Simplified, consolidated, and made cuter. 

The original pet profile was split across three separate screens, making setup feel slow and fragmented. I redesigned it into a single, streamlined screen—combining steps and reducing friction—while adding custom icons to boost clarity and personality.

Battery Icon Redesign

Designing clarity around invisible tech. 

I redesigned the battery and location icons to improve clarity and usability—while working around complex hardware and system limitations. Because data sync between the tracking device and the app wasn’t real-time, battery levels could sometimes lag behind actual status. To reduce confusion, I created intuitive visual indicators that helped set the right expectations for users, even when the backend data wasn't perfectly up-to-the-minute.

Helping with Visual Design — Custom Iconography

As the SyncUP PETS app evolved, I designed custom icons to support new features and improve clarity as the product matured.

Animated App Tour

Educate the user, buy the system time.

These animated tour screens guided users through key onboarding steps—like setting up Wi-Fi, firmware, and pet profiles—while cleverly masking necessary wait time. Behind the scenes, the PETS device and platform were busy connecting, syncing, and running checks. The animations kept users informed and engaged without noticing the invisible loading.

Animations

I made vector animations in after effects and exported them in Lottie Json format, making them dev ready for production.
Here are some of the animations I created.

⬆️  Above - Visual design for the app tour needed to be informative, cute and animation friendly. Here for example, are early concepts for the Virtual Boundaries and QR code scanning sections.

Health Journal

This feature was built to help users log medical details, appointments, and reminders in one place. Each section was thoughtfully planned and refined through multiple iterations, with a focus on clarity, simplicity, and ease-of-use for busy pet parents.

Here is an example of the Health Journal design progression. Wireframe concepts were created and tested as rapid prototypes. 

Research

Finding the best icon

To support a brand refresh across T-Mobile’s SyncUP apps, I explored dozens of new app icon concepts for PETS. The top 5 designs were tested through UserZoom with over 200 participants. The results gave us clear user preference data and a confident direction for the final icon design.

Building Results

Enhancing the PETS user experience—one pawprint at a time.

The SyncUP PETS app evolved significantly as we designed around complex hardware and platform limitations. Despite the challenges, the app grew to support over 40,000 users across iOS and Android.

The success of these user-focused updates helped spark new initiatives—like the creation of SyncUP TRACKER—and led to my promotion as design lead, where I was entrusted with TRACKER’s full product design, including leading a new team of designers.

Together, we delivered T-Mobile’s first IoT-connected product with real care—for pets, and the families who love them.

Disclaimer:
The work shown here was created during my time at T-Mobile and is presented solely for personal portfolio use. All visuals reflect my role and contributions, and are shared respectfully to highlight process and craft—not for public or commercial use.

Reflections 

Behind The Dogs and Paw Prints

SyncUP PETS was my first T-Mobile project, and it gave me the opportunity to work on a new IoT product while meeting incredible people—many of whom would later become part of future teams.

At T-Mobile’s Bellevue headquarters, I learned a ton from senior developers and product managers. Their insight pushed me to think more like an engineer—refining UX flows with backend logic in mind. Designing a product for pets felt extra rewarding, especially as a pet owner myself.

One of my favorite moments? Helping the QA team test PET tracking features by clipping a tracker to my belt and walking around town. It was hilarious, hands-on, and deeply humbling—learning product design quite literally from the field.

"...One of the few truly full stack designers..."

Gavin— Head of Consumer IoT Product, T-Mobile
April 8, 2022

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