Manya Sharma is a designer that specializes in UI/UX, design thinking and empathic design. She believes that design is a weapon that can change the world with one creative solution at a time.
For her capstone project, Manya leveraged skills of UI/UX, design thinking and competitive research to create a fully prototyped mobile application that connects residents of the U.S. with stray animals in India. I chose to create a prototype of a mobile application because they tend to have the most voice in the world of technology. Leveraging a platform that integrates social media, education and interaction can ultimately raise the most awareness of this issue.
As someone of Indian heritage, Manya had the privilege of visiting her home country on numerous occasions. While admiring everything that India has to offer, she couldn’t help but notice the overwhelming stray animal population. Every street I walked past had dogs picking at garbage left on the road or cats fighting to stay alive. She created Jeev in efforts to bring more monetary support to Indian Animal shelters and increase the awareness of the stray animal population in myhome country.
Jeev has various features including browsing through differentorganizations, blog posts and animals available to interact with. The most important feature to highlight is the ability for users to interact with these animals. While these interactions occur completely virtually, the users act as ‘sponsors’ by donating things like food, toys, treats, etc.. Manya leveraged gamification in this concept to incentivize users to donate as much as they can. Users that make it to the daily, weekly and monthly leaderboards are offered in-app rewards that can be used to further interact with the animals on the app.The goal of this project is to give the stray animals of India a chance at life. There is not nearly enough funding to support the 80 million dogs and cats that fight for their survival every single day – Manya hopes that donations from users can slowly start saving one life at a time.