AI Pet Portraits

Enabled Chewy customers to create stylized AI portraits with their pet for holiday sharing

context

Chewy is an online retail store for pet owners. It has built a loyal following by helping pet parents care for their pets as family members and through various surprise and delight programs like hand-painted portrait program. Customers are randomly selected and sent a hand painted portrait of their pet on different occassions.

BUSINESS GOAL

Evolve mobile app beyond utility and transaction to increase customer engagement
Explore how generative AI could add delightful moments and earn customer loyalty

IMPACT

23% increase in app engagement

My Role

End to end design from exploratory research to working with mobile devs and ML scientists to implement designs as per specs and measure impact for further iterations
Created design work back plans with Product Managers and Program Managers, secured critical resources (content writers, office hours with Researchers), and implemented designs directly with Android/iOS developers.
Iterated designs through close collaboration with stakeholders in brand, research, design system, and support.

Exploratory research

Given the problem space was quite broad to explore how generative AI could add value to Chewy customers, I led workshop with my PM to assess where Gen AI can help improve customer experience, generating 34 ideas. Detailed out the top 3 to test with 6 customers. AI Pet Portraits surfaced as the idea that resonated the most with customers.

CUSTOMER PROBLEM

The key question I explored here was: “What makes AI-generated portraits so delightful to Chewy customers?” Through user interviews and social listening, I uncovered that while customers loved the novelty and personalization of AI portraits, the deeper driver was recognition for their loyalty and emotional connection which Chewy’s existing hand-painted portrait program was struggling to meet. Its random selection process to surprise and delight customers left many loyal, high-spending customers, say Hydie, feeling overlooked and undervalued, creating a perception of unfairness and missed recognition.

Project Goal

Deliver AI pet portraits to Chewy’s loyal customers (spending $3k or more per year) as a special Christmas offering, enhancing loyalty recognition while preserving the exclusivity of hand-painted portraits.

UX Guardrails

Have consistent and unified Chewy branding like other offerings
Balance inclusivity and exclusivity. Make AI Portrait offering once, exclusive to customers spending $3k or more per year. Reserve hand painted portraits for curated users for special emotionally compelling moments and stories.
Develop trust by visually distinguishing AI features from the rest and giving control to users
Make the offering uniquely and exclusively Chewy.

Initial constraints

As I kicked off the project I learnt from my Product Manager that it was decided that stable diffusion image model will be used considering costs and ease with API integrations.

Worked closely with PM and devs to analyze selected image model to understand AI capabilities, limitations of the model.
Capabilities
- Customer gets100 stylized high quality pet portraits for free.
Limitations
- Customer needed to upload 10-20 photos of their pet to get desired output.
- The model took 30 minutes.
Analyzed published papers on interactive AI tools, other AI image models, AI tools and LLMs to understand related AI terms and pattern inspirations
- Trust and transparency are key to people when using AI
- Design for multiple output to handle imperfection