BabySteps

Parents and caregivers are essential. They are saddled with many responsibilities and it is important that we come up with ways to support them. Even our own team member had a child at the beginning of our project. After learning of his struggles and many responsibilities, we wanted to make an app that would be able to help him and others like him out.

To figure out their needs and pain points, we did some initial research to figure out what the current state of the world is for people who care for newborns. Our key insights were that:

A lack of support is exacerbated especially when leaving the hospital. Parents go from having the support of nurses, to being on their own. This can be very daunting, especially for first-time parents.

With information on the current state of the world and to guide our further steps, our team created an initial problem statement:

Now, with an area of focus, I led our team in conducting a competitive analysis. After scouring the app store for different baby tracking applications, we came up with a list of six apps currently on the market.

I found that Baby Tracker - Newborn log had all the features we wanted to implement and thought were important in our initial research. We had found our main competitor to test our app against.

However, just implementing those features would not set us apart in the baby health tracking market. To find out what would distinguish us from our competitors, we set out to gather information from our population of interest: parents and caregivers.

With my team, I created a Google Form to send out to different caregivers in our community. With only a few responses in, I started to notice a trend among our participants:

With this information, I posed to my team that we should include parent resources in our app. This would give parents a single app where they can track baby health, while also monitoring their own needs. Thus, saving them the extra work of looking for resources themselves.

As a team, we looked back at our list of competitors and noticed that none of them provided parent resources. We had found our secret sauce.

This also allowed us to update our problem statement:

With our problem statement in mind, I could start designing our app. As a brainstorming activity I did “crazy 8s” where I tried to brainstorm 8 different iterations of the home screen in 8 minutes. Going into this process, I knew I wanted a useful initial view to reduce navigation time and unnecessary clicks.

I ended up only coming up with 7, but a key idea was born from this process: the idea of a carousel.

With a carousel, navigating the app is easy and also allows for one handed access. This is important as they should be able to use the app while holding and taking care of their baby. It should not take them extra effort to use an app that is supposed to make their life easier.

With team agreement, I moved on to making lo-fi mockups of the app.

By making the lo-fi mockups, we realized that the save button would need to be bigger. Instead of having a checkmark somewhere hard to find and reach in the corner, a long button at the bottom would allow for easy access. This is pictured above.

With this completed, I translated our lo-fi mockups into hi-fi prototypes.

BabySteps App Demonstration video.

Since our project was only 10 weeks long, it was hard for us to do everything we wanted to. For example, we were unable to show our prototypes to prospective users, so any design iterations made were done through our own judgements.

We also had to overlap items on our timeline, instead of following a linear process. So before we could complete our user research completely, we had to start designing our app.

Additionally, our team only managed to collect 7 survey responses and conduct 1 interview, thus creating the possibility of missing out on vital user insights.

If this project were to continue, I would love to reach out to more prospective users and get their feedback and other general insights to inform our application’s design. Additionally, I would take another look at the user flows and make the app design more comprehensive.

As part of this project, I learned about “Crazy 8s” (rebranded as “Creative 8s” within my class). It is a great practice to take 8 minutes, with 1 minute per design to test out different design decisions. Since it was my first time using this type of brainstorm, I had trouble moving from design to design in a single minute. But the time constraint helped me keep my head out of the weeds, instead allowing me to focus on rapid ideation, with the principle that there are “no bad ideas.”

It was also a great way to see each of my teammates ideas for possible design solutions. It was interesting to see how everyone can come up with different solutions and what problems they choose to focus on in their solution.

Overall, it is a great way to bring together an amalgamation of the best ideas born from our diverse perspectives.