Catree | bobbyhzhao

Overview

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

The project relies on an intuitive design system that allows users to easily create and freely customize an artistically compelling and cat-accessible sculptural composition.

Role

Personal Venture

Product Design

UI UX Design

Tools

Figma

3ds Max

Rhinoceros

Illustrator

Lumion

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 userbase. 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

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.

Higher learning curve

Lower learning curve

System Architecture and Tool Bar Design

Recognizing the target users and their preference in the design interfaces, Catree’s design system needs to be visually and experientially intuitive.

1. 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.

Showroom Size

Furniture Size

Cat Tree Size

2. Building Foundation

Foundation Modules

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.

Career Discovery

Material Selections

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

3. 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.

4. Building Upper Level

Foundation Modules

Square

1/4 Rounded

1/2 Rounded

Surfaces

Full Surface

Attached Surface

1/2 Surface

1/4 Surface

Support Structures

Full Enclosure

1/2 Enclosure

1/4 Enclosure

Scratching Post

Fence

5. AR Fitting

AR fitting allows users to test out their design by providing them a reference with the surrounding environment. The AR build mode also allows real time designing experience that instantly brings the construction to life.