Shubing

Scope

Role

Experience designer (solo)

Context

MDes Studio: Experience (IXDGR 6600)

Timeline

2026.5 — 2026.8

Tools

Figma, Illustrator, Photoshop

Deliverables

Service concept · first-hand research · user journey map · web personalization flow · kit & packaging · mobile app

The reframe

The obvious framing for a project like this is that people don't take care of their cats well enough. Cats get sold as low maintenance and independent, and that gives owners permission to put in less. I mapped that chain first because it's where everyone starts, including me.

Where the framing broke

I was looking after a friend's cat at the time, a four-year-old golden shorthair named Shubing. He meows a lot. I read it as boredom and bought him a pile of toys, expecting a low maintenance cat to entertain himself with them.

He used two of them. The laser pointer and the feather wand, neither of which works unless a person is holding it. So the toys weren't really the problem and interactive play was already happening.

What broke down was me. The motion is the same every session, and after a few weeks I was getting nothing out of it. It turned into a chore. I was still caring about the cat, still doing the work, and it was still getting worse, which meant the problem I'd written down couldn't be the real one.

What I changed it to

So I moved the problem off the owner's intent and onto what the owner receives. People don't run out of care, they run out of return.

It's a small change in wording and it decided everything downstream. You can't design people into caring more. You can design an activity that gives them something back.

Enrichment tests

Before designing anything I spent several weeks running enrichment methods on a real cat and recording what happened on both sides. All of the research here is first-hand. The starting point came from social media, where people pick wild grass and weeds off the street and bring them home for their cats to smell.

Foraged plants

I picked a few stems off the sidewalk on the way home and gave them to Shubing. He sniffed, bit gently, then played with them, which is the result I was testing for.

The finding I wasn't testing for was on my side. To pick something worth bringing back I had to look at the street properly, at what was growing in the cracks and how it smelled and how the leaves felt. I'd done the interesting part before I got through the door.

Texture box and distributed snacks

I filled a box with paper, package scraps and plastic bags and buried snacks under all of it, so getting them out meant working through every layer. I also hid snacks around the apartment before leaving, which gave him somewhere to go while I was out.

What the tests told me

Every method gave the cat more to work with than a toy does, in smell, texture, sound and searching. The ones that also worked on me were the ones I had to build or go out and find. A wand toy only asks you to hold it. These took more effort and gave more back, and that difference is what the whole service is built on.

The design rule

Shubing is a shared sensory experience for cats and their owners.

I turned the research finding into one rule and used it to settle every decision after that. If an object only gives the cat an experience, it doesn't go in the box.

What the rule ruled out

• No traditional cat toys. Nothing in the kit comes off the pet store shelf, which cost me the easy products and forced the interesting ones.
• Every object needs the owner to do something to it. Spread the treat, fold the roll, wave the feather, set out the blotter and watch which one the cat rolls on.
• The neighborhood is part of the kit. The service tells you what's growing near you and sends you out to get it, so the experience doesn't stop at the box.

Naming the service after Shubing came out of the same rule. It's about one specific cat and the person attached to that cat, so it carries the name of the one that produced the research.

Personalization

The service has to produce a different box for every cat, so most of the design work went into the questionnaire that drives it. Twelve questions, each one mapped to something that changes in the kit.

I pressure-tested the flow with a persona pair. Hank is a busy doctoral student who wants to give his cat more than he currently does. Hashbrown is gentle, picky about food because of dental issues, and spends most of the day on the couch. Those dental issues are the reason a loofah turns up in his box later, which is the kind of link the questionnaire exists to make.

Getting people in

The entry point is an Instagram story ad, and both cards name a thought the target has already had. That the cat is bored, and that the toys were a waste of money.

The landing page asks for one thing, the cat's name, and promises three minutes. From the next screen on, the site uses that name instead of talking about cats in general.

Twelve questions

Breed, playstyle, age, medical conditions and so on. Two decisions did most of the work here. Every question is answered by picking pictures rather than typing, which is what keeps people moving through a twelve-step form. And every question carries a short note explaining why it's being asked, so the person is learning about cats while filling it in rather than just handing over data.

Location

The ZIP code sets shipping. It also returns a list of cat-friendly plants growing in that city, sorted by where to look for them. Sidewalk cracks and wild patches, neighbors' gardens, ones to grow, ones that come in the kit.

This is my own research finding turned into a product feature. It reaches the person before they've bought anything, and it's the part of the service they're least likely to have thought of on their own.

Questions that do two jobs

The last two ask for the cat's treat philosophy and the owner's goals. They feed the kit contents, and they also make the owner put words to a relationship they've never had a reason to describe. Most people haven't considered that their cat has a treat philosophy until they're asked to pick one.

The kit

The generated kit holds a dried loofah, recycled paper rolls, molted parrot feathers, edible fragrance blotters and a manual. Nothing in it reads as a cat toy, which is the rule doing its job.

Each object written as a product

Every item gets an ingredient list, a paragraph on how it enriches this particular cat, and instructions. The loofah says to spread lickable treats on it, which traces back to the dental answer, since chewing the dried gourd cleans a cat's teeth and the treat is what gets the cat to chew in the first place.

Writing them this way does two jobs. It justifies objects that would otherwise look like junk, and it gets the owner imagining the texture before the box has even shipped.

Packaging

The cat's name is printed inside the lid. It's the cheapest way I could find to make the personalization physical, and it's the first thing anyone sees on opening the box.

In use

Rinse the loofah, spread the treat, hand it over. The owner feels the fiber catch on their fingers while doing it, which is the shared sensory rule showing up inside an ordinary two-minute task.

The paper rolls are the item that changes behavior. They're recognizably household waste, and once someone has folded one into a treat puzzle and watched it work, they know they can make more from what's already in the apartment. At that point the service is trying to make itself unnecessary, which I think is the right ambition for it.

Play is no longer a one-way companionship, but a joy shared between them.

Finding the gap

I mapped the service as a journey, with stages, touchpoints, the senses in play at each step, and a line for anticipation. I built it mainly to check that the touchpoints were covered.

The anticipation line is what made it worth doing. It drops through the entire waiting-for-kit stage, which runs several days and is completely empty. That's where someone cools off on a thing they've just paid for.

The anticipation line drops through the whole waiting-for-kit stage.

So the app got scoped from evidence instead of habit. It exists to hold attention across a gap I had measured, which also told me what it needed to do and what it didn't. The confirmation email was rewritten to hand the person over to it rather than just confirm an order.

The app

The app installs under the cat's name, so the home screen says Hashbrown rather than Shubing. Same reasoning as the name inside the lid.

Community

A feed of other owners posting what they've tried. This is in the product for a specific reason. Watching other people's cats meet a plant is what got me to try it, so the loop that started my research is the one I wanted running inside the service.

Agent and scent library

An AI agent for the questions that come up mid-activity, and a scent library of what's growing nearby with what each plant does for a cat and where to find it. The library is the location feature from the questionnaire, kept live after the sale instead of used once.

Subscription

Wildplay, Hunter's Instinct, Kitten's Care. The contents change and the rule holds. Nothing off the normal shelf, and everything needs the owner to make something out of it.

What's next

The twelve questions carry the entire personalization and I've only tested them on paper. The next step is putting real cat owners through the flow to see which answers change the box in a way they actually notice, because a personalization system nobody can feel is just a longer checkout.

The subscription needs the same check. The second box has to land as well as the first one did, and right now that's an assumption rather than a finding.