PetPal is a local-and-travel recommendation app built around an adorable pet-IP companion. Instead of cross-checking five apps to find somewhere to eat, your pet proactively surfaces the best food, scenery and trending spots right now, so it feels less like a chore and more like a friend making plans with you.
Local food and travel recommendation is a multi-trillion-dollar market, but the experience is still "do your own homework": seed ideas on social apps, plan routes on travel apps, search restaurants on review apps, then cross-verify after spotting over-edited photos. Meanwhile the AI-companionship market is booming, proving people will pay for warmth and companionship: they just haven't found it anywhere useful yet.
Rather than one mascot, a whole pet family carries the range of user preferences: each member has a distinct personality suited to a different scenario. Users adopt a main buddy first (Shiba recommended by default), then unlock the rest through exploration.
Mochi · Shiba Inu
The All-Round Guide
Sugar · Calico Kitten
The Healing Companion
Bao · Panda
The Explorer
Pudding · Piglet
The Foodie
All four share one kawaii-healing visual language: warm tones, round forms, big eyes, so the cast always feels cohesive, and each specialty maps to a real scenario.
Each buddy ships with a full pose & expression set for animation and stickers.
Every feature decision traces back to three core principles that keep the product useful without losing its warmth.
Identity switches automatically by location and dwell time: no manual toggling.
For your own city: nearby, daily, frequent. Solves "what's good nearby?" in one tap, surfaces hidden neighborhood gems, and acts as your everyday city-life concierge.
Auto-triggers when you leave home: must-see and efficient. Generates a check-in map for the new city, surfaces top photo spots and local-only secrets, and plans half-day routes for you.
Answers arrive before you start cross-checking five apps.
Adapts to time, budget, taste and who you're with.
AI de-filters over-edited photos and flags spam reviews, so every pick is what it looks like.
From adoption to a daily habit loop in four steps.
Or just open the app: location, time and taste already do the asking for you.
No feed to scroll, just the spots worth your time.
Your buddy explains the pick: taste match, weather, real-visit trust score.
Check in, earn XP, and watch your buddy level up.
The first pass looked like any other recommendation feed: cards, filters, a "Check in" button. Testing the concept made it clear the pet needed to be part of the interaction itself, not a decoration bolted onto a normal app.
Twelve screens mapped the full path from splash to profile: entry & auth, buddy adoption, and the core loop, sketched by hand, pinned to a New York pilot context, so flow and hierarchy could be agreed on before any color, type, or 3D pet art entered the picture.
01 Splash · 02 Log in / Sign up
03 Choose your buddy · 04 Name your buddy
05 Taste quiz · 06 Enable location
07 Home · 08 Place detail / Check-in
09 Check-in map · 10 My Pet (nurturing)
11 Chat / Ask · 12 Profile / Me
01–12, grouped in pairs: Entry & Auth, Onboarding, and Core App. Click any pair to zoom.
On the place-detail screen the buddy doesn't just sit there — it pops in with its own take on the spot, so a plain match score turns into something closer to a friend's recommendation.
Mochi weighing in on The Ramen Spot before you check in.
Replaced a static placeholder pet icon with a buddy that stands free at the bottom of the screen and actually speaks up: proactive chatter by time and weather, live expressions that react to taps and check-ins, growth through XP, and themed outfits that fit the moment. It stopped being a passive icon and started feeling like a presence with its own personality.
A first pass at collectible skins: zodiac costume sets for Mochi, Sugar, Bao and Pudding, with the rest of the family planned to follow.
Adopt a buddy → set your taste → get 1–3 trusted picks → see why → check in → grow your pet. “Finding somewhere good” ends up feeling like hanging out with a companion, rather than filling out a search form. Below is an early interactive prototype of the onboarding-to-home flow, built to sanity-check pacing and layout before any of this goes into development.
Choosing a buddy, then landing on the home feed. Click to view larger.
Designing a companion-first product is different from designing a tool: every screen has to answer "what would the pet say here?" as much as "what does the user need to see?" Balancing a genuinely useful recommendation engine against a kawaii, emotional layer, without either one undercutting the other, has been the central design tension of this project, and one I'm still actively working through.
"Does pet-IP companionship plus proactive personalized recommendation significantly outperform traditional search tools on retention and acceptance rate?"
"From an information tool to an emotional companion: less 'search, compare, get burned,' more being cared for, guided, and accompanied, wherever you are."
Prove the core loop first in a single NYC neighborhood, then expand city by city.
Single NYC neighborhood. Buddy + right-now picks + check-in loop. Validate retention.
Travel mode, smart routes, check-in map. Richer nurturing & unlocks.
Trust engine — de-filtered photos, anti-spam reviews. More cities, merchant listings & membership.
IP collabs & merch, open ecosystem, real-visit data moat.
Retention first, monetize gently once the loop works: pet skins and premium companionship, merchant listings and redemption share, and brand/IP collabs with F&B, travel and pet merchandise brands. Emotion and utility form a dual engine, so revenue grows alongside trust instead of competing with it — avoiding over-commercializing before the core experience has earned its keep.
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