Kinder | Connecting mother’s to their support system

Opportunity

At General Assembly’s User Experience Design Immersive Program, for our fourth project we were given the opportunity to address our own problem space, and find a solution for our user.

Problem Space

My team decided to address pregnancy, pre-natal and postpartum, and over the course of two weeks our team would conduct research on pregnancy, and mother’s experiences postpartum; in order to understand how women organize their life and their child’s schedule.

During this process, we used the following UX methodologies:

Business Research

• Topic Map
• Business Model Canvas
• User Interviews
• Affinity Mapping

User Research

• Moscow Map
• Feature Prioritization Map
• Persona
• User Journey Map
• Usability Tests

Design

• Design Studio
• Usability Testing
• Mid-Fidelity Prototype
• High-Fidelity Development

Outcome

Through our research, we developed Kinder. An app that provides a space for new mom’s to organize their child’s information and keep in contact with their support system.

But if I may, I’d like to go back to the beginning and express in detail how we developed Kinder.

We began by developing assumptions about what our user may currently be experiencing during pregnancy and postpartum such as

• New mothers working full-time have a hard work/life balance
• New mothers experience a variety of emotions
• New mothers rely on support of loved ones, partner or doctor to ensure they are on the right track

From there, we drafted an initial problem statement, which we could later revise or expand upon further research.

How might we create a space where new mothers or mothers to be can have access to various tools and resources to document their new journey?

Within our scope of research we would focus on the following:

• Women who have experienced pregnancy first hand
• Women who have given birth within the last three years

As we began identifying the role Kinder would play in parents lives, we realized Gerber would be a phenomenal partner that would allow us to bridge the gap between parent’s daily routine and caring for our users children. In particular, Gerber stood out to use because of it’s mission statement:

“Just like your baby, we’re always growing and learning. Now more than ever, we’re committed to being your partner in parenthood with quality ingredients, nutritious food and expert guidance. Here’s a peek under the lid to show you how we’re growing with you and your little one.”

Then, we developed a Screener Survey that would allow us to choose the best user that fit’s our target audience. From there, we contacted 5 of these mothers and sad down to discuss their experiences, during pregnancy and as a new mother. Through our user interviews, we received tremendous feedback, but five themes in particular stuck out to us-

• Parents feel overwhelmed using numerous apps to keep track of their child’s schedule and development.
• Parents to not have a set schedule, and are working off of trial and error.
• Parents want to have a network of close family and trusted advisors with them throughout the process.
• Parents find a journal to document their feelings and schedules to be very helpful.

But most importantly, when we asked mothers what they would say to their past self during pregnancy the answer warmed our hearts:

“Be KINDER to yourself.”

With this information from our user interviews, we conducted a feature prioritization map, and moscow map, which would allow us to choose which features we would integrate into our first iteration of design and which features would be left on the back burner to later iterations.

After we conducted these methodologies, we settled on the following four key features:

• One specific space where parents can keep track of their children’s schedule and development.
• An easy and understandable way to share information with your primary care physician as needed.
• A way for parents to connect with their family & trusted advisors
• An outlet for the ups and downs that occur as a new mother

After these conversations and UX methodologies, we wanted to create a voice for these mothers that could speak to us through the design process. Meet Nicole-

Nicole is a supermom — a successful Content Specialist at Redbull, a wife, mother, and occasionally housekeeper and chef.

As we grew a better understanding of our mother Nicole, we wanted to create a clear outline of what her typical day as a supermom can look like. This includes her schedule as well as her highs and lows that may come with balancing a career and motherhood. But for this platform, we really wanted to hone into Nicole’s lowest part of her day. When she’s on the phone with her primary care physician, and is unable to recall any of the information about her child’s routine and appointments in order to answer the doctors questions. This leaves Nicole feel upset and incompetent.

Our focus at Kinder: we know that new parents are constantly feeling overwhelmed — frustrated sifting through many apps,, notes, and folders But how does this affect Nicole? When it comes to sharing her daughter’s daily routine she is unable to give her doctor clear and accurate information. So how might we keep an open line of communication between parents and their primary care physician?

To fully bring Kinder into fruition after our journey map, our team conducted a design studio session, that allowed us to casually throw around different ideas and propose layouts for each page. This led to our Low-Fidelity sketches as you can see below:

From here, we create a medium-fidelity prototype at greyscale through Figma. But we we’re finished here. We had to ensure what we designed worked, and was easily understandable for our user. So we conducted usability testing with five new users who fit our target audience and gave them a scenario with four correlating tasks.

• Create an account for your daughter Quinn.
• Export Quinn’s data for you next doctor visit.
• View the photos of your child’s first doctors appointment
• Create a new journal entry for yourself

This allowed us to identify some key grows and glows for app such as:

Glows:

• Loved that sleeping and schedule data aggregated into informational graphs
• Loved the ability to easily send her child’s information directly to her doctor
• Loved that she could easily make her photos private or public, and send them to her social media accounts or send them to her family and friends

Grows:

• Did not enjoy that they were unable to export their journal entries
• Didn’t like that we had a hamburger menu
• They were unsure of the logistics of the schedule tracker, and couldn’t fully understand the user flow

With this invaluable feedback, we were able to resolve key issues by creating an export button for the journal, and creating a set navigation bar. In addition, mothers were mainly unsure of the logistics of the schedule tracker, this required us to go back and rethink the flow of our design.

With these adjustments, we developed a high-fidelity prototype that would include imagery as well as our logo and color schemes. From here, we began testing five new users to see if the adjustments we made would make an impact on the users experience.

With the usability test results in, we saw a 100% success rate for every single task.

But what are our next steps?

As the project gets larger and continues to expand, we want to begin to consider the Heart Framework in order for our team to continue to be aligned. If you are not familiar with the heart framework it helps a company evaluate any aspect of its user experience according to five user-centered metrics, which are happiness engagement, adoption, retention , and task success.

We decided to focus on two main metrics: Engagement and Adoption The engagement is the level of user involvement. For Kinder, engagement is a critical pillar in the app because the more data that is input, the more you will benefit from the app. Adoption is new users of a product or feature. We feel engagement and adoption for this app go hand in hand. The more people are engaging with the app, the more likely they will encourage others to also download and use the app…..especially in a tight community like motherhood, where pregnant women will impart their knowledge on soon to be mothers. Based on the information data we receive from this, we will make adjustments accordingly.

We hope this app helps women reach their true potential, and realize they are not alone post pregnancy. For people who don’t have children- we hope our brand shows you the strength and dedication of moms around the world….and we want to leave you inspired by all the mothers you know.