Nurture
Find Toddler Activities and Babysitters in One Place
Parents with young children face many of the same challenges, and yet can feel isolated and cut off from resources. Our desire was to find ways to connect young parents with activities and hired help in ways that enhance community connections.
Many services out there offer babysitting, and other services offer access to endless lists of activities and events. We wanted to explore the possibility of bringing these two together in a focused way specifically for parents with young kids.
"How might we create a more seamless and community-driven process for parents to connect with community activities and babysitters on a mobile platform?"
The primary intended audience is parents with toddlers. This does not preclude parents with somewhat older children, but in our design process they currently are secondary.
The platform is also intended for prospective babysitters.
The team was made up of 3 designers: Edward Cho, Ola Merzah, and Elijah Wilcott. Edward, with his strong design background, provided key guidance in the development of the app’s appearance and marketing. Ola, with her experience as a mother with a young child, drove the user research. Elijah focused in on market research as well as the overall user flow architecture.
All three were responsible for wire-framing and finalizing design on separate parts of the app.
As a school project with only a two-week window, the project required a modest scope. The team originally had grand ideas to incorporate many aspects of social media, but settled on an MVP that focused on the babysitter hiring process. Future goals would include greater incorporation of social networking features.
To begin, we discussed an app for parents with toddlers that offers babysitting and also shows nearby activities. A member of our team is precisely in this stage of life, and has many potential users as contacts. We looked at a broad variety of services already out there, before narrowing in on a few choices.
We chose 4 apps to compare: Care, Bambino, Helpr and Urbansitter. We then dove a little deeper into Bambino to examine the babysitter hiring process.
In the screener survey, we looked for parents who have some level of involvement with networking platforms, and would be interested in finding one that is specific to parents.
In the discussions with users, we focused in on obstacles to hiring babysitters online. We also explored the possibilities for simultaneous networking while looking for babysitters.
We interviewed 4 prospective users, in addition to informal discussions with other parents. Many parents are Facebook users, even though a number of them said they don’t particularly like the platform; it’s just really useful for finding events. Several busy parents expressed interest in a “one-stop” app that includes everything they need from social media for supporting their parenting tasks.
Edward took the information Ola gathered, as well as engaging in his own research and conversations, and created the user journey map. We found that many parents were using Facebook as a primary resource, and he charted out what an average user might experience in that process.
Based on these discussions, all 3 team members were given the assignment to create a persona. This allowed for all three team members to carefully review the interview notes, and reach their own conclusions on the kind of user would benefit from this app. The team found that all 3 personas were quite similar, reflecting unity on the team regarding future direction.
We took the unconventional approach of each one of us, on our own, of coming up with lists of what we thought might work as a “How Might We” statement, based on user interviews. Not surprisingly, our thoughts turned out to be quite similar.When we met to go over the possibilities, our discussion centered more on the scope of the project than on differences of opinion. Our final How Might We Statement: How might we create a more seamless and community-driven process for parents and babysitters to connect on a mobile platform?
And then the fun began!
Since we are not working in person, we set aside one hour to discuss our various findings (interviews, competitive analysis, online research, etc). We looked through our accumulated notes, and physically (either via keyboard or pen) noted down things we were observing. We brainstormed ideas on how to lay out an app that meets the needs we discovered.
After we came up with the basic essential pages we would need, we split up and spent an afternoon each doing our own initial sketching. That evening, we met again to compare our results. Edward and Ola chose to use Figma, while I used paper and pen - even though I'm more of a developer than an artist; my pages were hideous, but fortunately that didn't matter.
We met again that evening to share what we had done - whether on paper or in Figma. We merged a lot of our ideas together, and chose to use Ola's Figma board moving forward.
We were now at a point where we needed to get our "list" of needed design pieces organized, so I stayed up late one night and created a User Flow with sticky notes all over my office wall. I took a picture and shared it with the group. With that solidified, I used Figma to create a digital version, looking back and forth between my wall and my computer monitor.
We ended up coming up with two different iterations: Our "minimum viable product" User Flow, which focused in on the babysitter-hiring experience, and a more fleshed-out User Flow that includes more options for creating and commenting on Activities.
The moment we had been working toward had finally come: Begin building the wireframe that would lead to the real design. We again took the approach of having all 3 of us begin on our own, coming up with separate ideas. After comparing, discussing, and choosing how to combine our ideas, we settled on Ola’s file as the one we would all work on.
With the wireframes in place, working on the hi fidelity prototype was a joy. Edward came up with a beautiful design based on different shades of purple, with Poppins being the font of choice for the name of our app: “Nurture”. We began by creating basic components that would be needed throughout the app - header, footer, and cards.
We then linked it all together, to create a smooth experience for our test users. Edward’s deep knowledge of Figma was critical in this stage, as he was able to quickly overcome questions Ola and I had on how some of that should work. Figma file here.
Ola went back to her original interviewees, had them play with the functioning prototype, and give her feedback on what they were experiencing. On the positive side, they were enthusiastic about the app and said that if it were to be built, they would be interested in using it. On the constructive side, their only consistent complaint was font size; fortunately, this is easy to fix, and we bumped up the size on those screens where it had been a problem.
We were excited to see this all come together. We had to make some hard decisions on what we included on this initial version, but feel that we made the right choices.
We focused in on the essentials for finding and hiring a babysitter, which was only part of our initial vision. Our prototype does include a screen for finding local activities, but we would love to expand on this - giving users the chance to create their own activities, as well as comment on and share activities. This requires a much more ambitious social media kind of architecture.
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