Designing a one-stop application for new and busy parents to manage their time and resources

Time + Duration
Summer 2020
3 months
Roles
Interface Design
Experience Design
Research + Strategy
Web Design + Development
Team
Robert Michels
Kaitlyn Andres
Akshay Chawla
Aditya Mawlankar
Dawood Shafqat

Overview

Amae (‘甘え’), Japanese for the closeness between parent and child, is a peer to peer platform for new and busy parents to find the childrearing resources they need and keep track of their new tasks as parents. Its goal is to promote communal parenting that is typically more common in Eastern cultures as a solution to the expectation modern parents face when juggling work and parenthood.

This assignment was a semester long project for an upper level user interface course that resulted in a prototype and product website.

Issue

Research showed that there is an unequal distribution of labour distributed between new parents. Often, mothers are still considered the primary caregiver for newborns even if both parents are working to support the family. Mothers were frequently burning out from juggling child-care challenges with work responsibilities.

In many instances, burnout (especially for mothers) occurs because there’s not enough support. About 42% of parents surveyed by UrbanSitter say they do not currently have child care, while a third are reliant on family to watch their children while they work.

Findings

To understanding our target audience, we decided to conduct a brief online survey on a popular online forum dedicated to postpartum mothers. It gave us important insight into the challenges new parents face as well as their current avenues of assistance. This was a valuable step for us to cultivate a more sophisticated understanding of the needs and goals of our future users.

Solution

We decided to build a one-stop application that addressed the issues highlighted by our primary and secondary research. Following communal parenting principles, Amae would give parents the ability to:

  • Assign tasks to their partners and/or guardians
  • Outsource their tasks to babysitters in their area
  • Learn and engage with childrearing and parenting topics

Features

Taskboard
The taskboard, the application’s primary dashboard, helps parents to schedule important events and assign frequently occurring tasks to their partners and/or guardians.

This features also gives parents the opportunity to utilize the task-outsourcing feature by allowing them to easily connect with nannies whom they may want to assign tasks to should they be interested in hiring one.

Designing the taskboard was a way for the application to empower mothers by giving them the ability to distribute parenting tasks to their entrusted families and friends. Parents can configure the frequency of specific tasks, setting them to rotation or assigning certain tasks to a specific guardian.

Nanny
The nanny feature allows parents to surf through available nannies in their area. In a single tap, parents are able to learn more about nannies they are interested in by browsing their profiles for reviews and ratings.

Parents can message nannies right away if they are interested, either directly from the taskboard by selecting a specific task that they need assigning to, or through the nanny page where parents can browse through a list of nannies in their area.

Learn
The learn feature provides new parents with relevant and valuable child-rearing resources. One of the issues that we discovered was the abundance of information for child-rearing, making it difficult for new parents to find information that is both credible and reliable.

The learn feature is made up of two parts: an page where writers vetted by Amae can post their articles and a discussion forum for parents to start a conversation about a particular topic of interest. Amae opens up this avenue for new parents to connect with other parents in the same boat, as well as more experienced ones.

Chat
The chat feature allows for enhanced integration within the app where the parent can stay in touch and/or delegate tasks to other parents, families and nannies. This integration allows the parent to spend less time on different communication channel while spending more time with their child.

The chat feature includes a video calling feature helps reassure parents of the safety and wellbeing of the child in the hands of another guardian or nanny.

The chat is a convenient access point for parents to assign tasks to outsourced nanies, getting instant notifications on every step of the booking process from assignment to completion. Simplified ease of booking alleviates parents of their worries and focus instead on spending time with their child.

Interaction Patterns


Horizontal Scroll Modules
One common thread across the application is the use of modules that can be scrolled horizontally. I found that this interaction pattern allowed users to see more details in each module, more so than a standard list format with vertical scrolling. This was particularly useful in creating the nanny cards. I took inspiration from dating apps like Tinder where users are taken through a selection journey one individual at a time. I found that a horizontal scroll interaction helped parents to connect with nanny profiles more by narrowing the user’s attention to roughly 3-5 nannies in a single glance.

Horizontal scroll was also useful in other features of the app, such as learn. This use of two dimensions helps users by showing a variety of options without making them visit separate category pages (selections from discussions and articles can be placed in one overview page, for example)

Style



Visual Design
The modules in our application was inspired by Google’s Material Design, which uses more grid-based layouts, responsive animations and transitions, padding, and depth effects such as lighting and shadows. As for the colour scheme, we focused on creating a bright and vibrant palette with an iconic pink accent to convey a cheerful and light-hearted feel.

Familiarity
Overall, we wanted Amae to follow conventional mobile-application style guidelines so that it was easy for new users to learn the various interactions of the application, modelling the modularity of the application with the likes of Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest, some of the most commonly used applications amongst our target demographic.

Reflection

Developing Amae’s design, from the kinds of features it would have to the specific font-face we wanted to use, was a challenging but ultimately fulfilling process.

I believe the most important takeaway from this project was the importance of empathy in the design thinking process. Creating an application for a demographic that I personally don’t identify with proved to be a challenge, which pushed me to delve deep into the resources that were available to me in order to have a more sophisticated understanding of the needs of our user.



In making sure we addressed the needs of our user as a priority, I created a user journey at the start of our ideation process. This document was a helpful resource that my teammates and I could continuously refer back to, to make sure that we were always aligned with our prior guiding principles throughout the course of the project even as we broke up into smaller divisions. It helped us retain a collective vision that could be communicated across different design stages and roles.

I learned to be a better team-player, by capitalizing on my strengths and communicating my weaknesses. In terms of technique, I learned to be more consistent in fleshing out the designs of the Amae screens. I also learned how to take advantage of prototyping tools to further enhance the experience and accessibility of mobile applications.