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Raising children is a big deal for parents. First-time parents are often looking for all the information they need to make sure their children can grow up healthy. However, children of different ages have different needs, and the complex needs often make parents sometimes unaware of the needs of children at each stage of development. BabyU is a mobile app that provides baby development tools and resources made easier for first-time parents to facilitate, to monitor, and to keep track of. With BabyU, parents can conveniently check their child's physical and mental development in real time and identify what they need.
First-time parents do not realize the critical importance of baby's physical and mental development in the first months and years. While they do value basic indicators such as weight, height and diet, they may overlook the different skills children need to exercise to ensure full development. With this in mind, we defined our goal as:
How might we provide a mobile product that enhances the experience of a first-time parent's baby's health development with resources that reflect, support, and encourage their baby's developmental needs?
Two of the top grossing parenting apps in the US Google Play Store are Kinedu and BabySparks. The global brand BabyCentre offers a parenting guide that has been installed over 10 million times whereas the official website content reaches about 100 million individuals each month.
Kinedu
BabySparks
$1.9 billion
is the estimated value of parent coaching industry in 2019
94%
of women use the Internet to find pregnancy details that are generally offered by health specialists
9 - 21%
of women experience depression and/or anxiety at the transition to parenthood period
Finding resources that match their baby's level of development
Baby physical growth tracking does not reflect their development momentum
Worry over vaccination safety and the ability to keep track of their baby's vaccinations records
Lack of informal social networking mobile apps for parental emotional support and development
Overall, many reviews claim that it is hard for them to connect with the rigid statistics or development structures set up for them. They say the apps often make them believe their child is not on track with their development when really all children have different momentums growing up. Additionally, many parents ask about specific problems that are not addressed in the video tutorials.
Jane is a first-time parent who needs to find and track baby development activities and milestones because it helps her understand her 2-months baby's growth development.
We then ideated features and sketched out the wireframe using InVision, the major functions are:
Our first version of mid-fidelity prototype contains 5 primary features.
Register an account by entering email address, password, parents' info, and child's info
Learn about the parenting knowledge of children at different stages
Check the child's skill development and the corresponding exercises
Daily or weekly exercise that ensuring the healthy development of children
Intelligent recommendation of uncompleted vaccines and provide records of completion status and dates
We had two rounds of one-on-one usability test with 5 participants in total. The tests were conducted remotely via Zoom. We tested on five scenarios that cover the primary features listed in the last section, and the participants were asked to perform think aloud protocol. After the testing session, they received 7 questions about their experience and a SUS questionnaire to fill out.
Do users get stuck while using the app?
Do users feel that any feature is missing from the app?
For what reason(s) would users stop using the app?
First-time parent with one child * 4
Experienced parent with two children * 1
Scenario 1 (onboarding): An expert recommends an app to help you learn how to be a first-time parent. You download it without checking the details. You want to learn more about the app and sign up for an account. You download it without checking the details. You want to learn more about the app and sign up for an account.
Scenario 2 (parents academy): You have a 2-months-old baby. This is your first time raising a baby, and you want to resume your learning for being a first-time parent for your baby's age group.
Scenario 3 (development milestones): Your doctor told you that giving your baby workouts is necessary for the development of their growth, mentally and physically. You have been monitoring your child's development through the application. You want to check the status of your baby's development to see if they are performing well in all aspects. However, if not, you are to attempt to complete the related exercise.
Scenario 4 (exercises): Your doctor told you that giving your baby regular exercise is necessary for physical development. You want to learn how to do the basic exercise.
Scenario 5 (vaccination): You understand that vaccination is important to protect your child's health. You have recently taken your child to receive a vaccine named Rotavirus, and you want to make a record in the app.
User action: They got stuck after landing on the Fine Motor Skills page
"I thought they are only checkboxes that I can check and uncheck them."
"I didn't realize those are clickable and bring me to a more informative page."
Action: Add an arrow indicating clickability; Make the styles and colors of status indicators consistent over different sections
User action: They failed to notice their child's fine motor needs improvement. Instead, they were blindly exploring the app.
"I think my child is performing well."
Action: Highlight "Needs improvement" in red
"Here (social page) it might be cool to have some supervisors that if you have some questions, you can just ask them."
Action: Add an option to start conversation with an expert for consulting purpose in the chat
"Maybe you can put stuff saying that what kind of books they can read now? Are there any resources? And I can just click the link and buy it right away."
"For parents working at home and kids are at home and doing online school, if there are any resources that are already in this app, that would be super useful."
Action: Added a tab for selecting Courses and Resources
"All parents I know are super busy. Vaccination reminder is a very useful thing. If there is a chance or function that you can add to a calendar, that would be super helpful, because I don't have to go to my calendar and do the extra stuff."
Action: Provide an option to add a vaccination event to calendar in the homepage and vaccination record page
"What frustrated me is that I am not able to see if anything is logged."
"Is there a logging of completed exercises?"
* Changes needed in the next step
"But what if I have other vaccinations like additional vaccinations? Is there a way to add something that is not in the list? Because there are vaccinations that are recommended and optional ones. I might like to give them more vaccinations."
* Allow adding optional vaccine and the change is implemented in UI redesign
"I don't want to go through an entire course. I may want to know how to deal with a particular situation immediately and not have to go through a course to find it. If content isn't easy to find I would look at other ways to find info"
Action: Added a tab for selecting Courses and Resources
"When I'm using this app, I don't care about 2 year olds, 3 year olds etc. I want it to be laser focused on my child's age and I want everything I'm seeing based around my kid."
* Add "locked" features and the change is implemented in UI redesign
| Finding | Consequence | Confidence | Next Step |
|---|---|---|---|
| No day-to-day activity log | Users don't have the ability to log details of exercises | An activity log gives parents a journaling option | Provide a logging feature |
| Cannot record optional vaccinations | Users will rely on other methods to record vaccinations | Provide a thorough vaccine tracking experience | Implement an "add vaccine" feature (completed in UI redesign) |
| The way in which we visually display the child's development progress needs to be handled with more sensitivity | Users may develop negative emotions toward the app | Further investigate how parents would like to view their child's progress | Conduct A/B testing with more participants on the development curve feature and incorporate widgets |
| Parents don't want to see information that isn't directly relating to their child | Users find the app forcing unnecessary information on to them and stop using the app | The app should feel like it is focusing on the user's child completely | Enable "locked" features for modules (completed in UI redesign) |
| Homepage is visually dull and not "welcoming" | Users won't be excited to use the app | Utilize visual design to create a more delightful experience | Implement a design system. Make charts more appealing (completed in UI redesign) |
The project is "finished" after conducting the usability test. However, I feel that there are a lot of improvement opportunties in terms of UI design. Therefore, I independently redesigned the UI and at the same time finished some previously unimplemented changes based on insights from usability testing.
After
Before
The original UI had only one main color, and most of the screen was grayscale color, which made the interface very dull and monotonous. To make it more welcoming and baby-ish, I implemented neumorphism style by adding drop shadow and inner shadow to the elements. Moreover, I added more colors to the interfaces and redesigned the primary and secondary colors.
The original primary color is #8FFF00 with black text on it. The bright green is not very friendly to the user's vision and thus cannot pass the accessibility. Instead, I used a more saturated color #4EA1A5 with white text and #E6ECEE with dark blue texts as the primary colors, which take up 90% of the screens. I chose #F2B06D as the secondary color and make it occupy the remaining 10%.
Click here to experience the work.
During our user testing, parents mentioned that they would have loved to have an app like this when they were starting off as first time parents.
