Norbo

Norbo is a personal project born from observing a recurring limitation in pet management apps: nearly all existing products — from 11pets to PetDesk, from FurFolio to Pawtrack — are built around dogs and cats, relegating every other type of animal to a marginal exception, poorly supported both in terms of features and content. Norbo reverses this approach: from the design stage, every animal category is treated as a first-class citizen, with dedicated onboarding paths, specific event types, and tailored care content, all while maintaining a unified and coherent user experience.

## Every species as a first-class citizen

Every animal category has dedicated onboarding paths, specific events, and tailored care content:

## The pet profile and life diary

At the heart of the app is each pet's profile: complete records managed through an add flow that varies by the chosen category. For those who don't know the animal's exact breed or origin — a common situation for adoptions or exotic species — options like 'Mixed breed', 'I don't know', or 'Approximate' are always available, so a mandatory field never becomes an obstacle. Around the profile develops a timeline of health and life events:

## The Reminder Engine

A distinctive choice of Norbo was designing reminders as an autonomous, centralized system, separate from the health timeline — a true 'deadline hub' accessible as a main section of the app. Each reminder generates push notifications with integrated quick actions — 'done' or 'snooze' — that let you handle deadlines without even opening the app, with the stated goal of avoiding 'notification fatigue': at most one notification per day per animal. The Reminder Engine handles reminders of very different natures:

## Photo album and expense tracking

Each animal has its own dedicated photo album, designed to collect memories and moments over time. In parallel, Norbo includes an expense tracking system, useful both for those who simply want to keep track of costs and for those who manage multiple animals and want an overall view:

## The Service Center

The product's most recent evolution is the 'Service Center', a section dedicated to practical tools and calculators designed to give immediate value to users, even before they've registered an animal. The tools are dynamically filtered based on the registered animals, but the cross-cutting ones remain always accessible, with non-intrusive invitations to add a pet when relevant. Every output comes with a clear disclaimer: these are general, indicative guidelines that in no way replace a veterinarian's advice.

## Design and visual identity

Norbo also stands out for its aesthetic direction: warm, careful, welcoming, yet at the same time premium and never childish or aggressive. The stated references are products like Headspace, Calm, Notion, and Things — a visual language far from the cold, clinical aesthetic typical of veterinary apps.

## Privacy and transparency

Norbo adopts a privacy-by-design approach from the ground up. This philosophy also extends to the product's presentation website, which uses no analytics or tracking scripts of any kind. For the launch, complete legal documentation was produced, available in Italian and English:

## Tech stack

From an implementation standpoint, the mobile app follows a modular architecture based on Domain-Driven Design, with separate bounded contexts for animal management, the health timeline, the reminder engine, media management, expenses, and care content:

Norbo is developed independently, by a single developer, following an iterative approach: every new feature — a new Service Center tool, a new legal document, a new animal category to cover in depth — is designed, validated, and implemented one at a time before moving on to the next. This 'one thing at a time' approach makes it possible to maintain high quality even in a project that is ambitious in feature coverage and animal species.