Petco — rethinking the navigation that holds e-commerce, services and care together.

One app, three businesses, one menu.

Below is a user experience focused project specializing in design and prototype testing for Petco's navigation system. It is focused on e-commerce, services, and digital innovation.

The hard part: a single navigation has to carry retail (food, toys, treats), services (grooming, vet, training), and account / membership — without making any of them feel like an afterthought.

Three prototypes, same tasks.

We took three structurally different navigation models, built them to the same fidelity, and ran them against the same task set with the same audience.

• → Bottom-tab model with services elevated
• → Hub model — services as its own top-level destination
• → Pet-profile-led, where the pet anchors discovery

The pet, not the product, anchors the experience.

The pet-profile-led model outperformed the others on services discovery and felt warmer to participants — they referred to the app by their pet's name, not by category. The retail flows held up, suggesting we could lean into "the pet" as a navigational anchor without losing the cart.

Lessons travelled.

A few things I carried forward: comparative testing is almost always worth the extra build cost; the warmest IA usually wins on a tie; and people are happy to navigate by emotion if you give them the chance.