Designing an honest baby diary with moms
UX case study
Client: Moeller — Ventures / My role: UX Researcher @ UX Studio Team Methods: user interview, persona, customer journey, competitive research, prototype, usability test / Worked with: Luca, Nori, Dan from UX Studio Team
A Berlin investor company found UX Studio and gave us 2 months to completely rethink and redesign Bebino, their online baby diary web application.
It started as the owner’s passion project some years ago but it lost focus for a number of years. Their registered users slowly churned out because of the site’s complexity, missing basic features (like video sharing), and not being responsive.
So we ended up with the UI below and that is the end of the story…
Oh, no wait … the way we got there was much more interesting.
Goals
- Validate (and invalidate!) ideas: collect the maximum amount of validated learning about users with the least amount of effort. Decide which features to keep and which to kill.
- Create UX strategy: analyse the market, users’ motivations and pain points and create value innovation.
- Redesign: the website should be responsive and based on user needs.
Challenges
- Design for real life: there are many cases we needed to consider: patchwork families, twins/triplets, miscarriage. These cases can make aspects like information architecture and content strategy tricky.
- Red-ocean market: the baby market is crowded with other direct and indirect competitors so we needed hard research work to find the way to differentiate ourselves.
The team
My role was to lead and carry out the research work and present the insights to the team.
Schedule
- Week 1–2 Discover: User interviews / Competitive Analysis
- Week 3 Define: Persona & Customer Journey workshop / UX Strategy
- Week 4–6 Test: Card sorting / paper sketches /prototype / usability tests
- Week 7–8 Deliver: Moodboards / Look & Feel / Detailed design
UX PROCESS
1. Visiting moms-to-be and parents during their daily life
Everyone has an idea (at least from the Facebook feed) how people save and share memories about their babies. But we took this project as an experiment and as if we were completely new to the topic. We started with a one page plan summarising our research questions:
Who writes baby diaries? What motivates them? What problems do they have and how do they currently solve them?
Mapping digital behaviour of parents (memory saving, sharing, development tracking, ToDos).
OK, but who will let us into their home and share their most personal memories?
We could not miss this opportunity, because for us it was crucial to observe how parents interact with their kids and technology. So the task was to recruit moms-to-be and parents who regularly follow their child’s development and write a baby diary online or on paper. Our main recruitment sources were: related Facebook groups, asking friends of friends and contacting bloggers.
Moms talk honestly about motherhood
We carried out 20 interviews in total, in homes, in our office and on Skype. To warm up these interviews we started with a ‘Day-in-the-Life’ activity that involved asking parents to describe their day, from morning to evening, and all the interactions they had with technology and their kids.
We also asked them to show us their baby diaries and tell us when and what do they write and with whom do they share it. It was impressive how openly they talked about those things.
2. Identify the “aha!” moments and surprises
Time to meet with our client for a one day interactive strategy session. Based on the interview results we created an experience map and personas with our client to understand users’ motivation and pain points.
So we mapped the experience of mothers in different phases of motherhood to diagnose what do they write about and which issues they face.
“Sometimes I just feel tired and bad…so I want to write those things out of myself.”
The most important learning was that they expressed motherhood is not only about happiness. They did want to write down their honest thoughts but felt baby diaries were too childish for that.
We grouped the observed activities into 4 different categories and checked how typical they were. The goal was to define which activities and problems we wanted to tackle first.
“Time flies so quickly. Once the moment is gone, you can not go back to take pictures.
Go broad and brainstorm possible solutions to users’ pain points.
We collected possible solution ideas and inspirations. The basic rule was that nothing is technically unfeasible; this session was to generate possible approaches, not create UI designs.
Bebino is a family diary, not only a baby diary, to enable parents to have a private feed for their intimate feelings
The conclusion was that we create a memory saving and development tracking app where mothers and fathers can also note their private thoughts. Users can share memories, but only with the added family members and friends. We didn’t need another social network app, so chat and most of the community features were killed.
The plan was to start the testing and validation with the most painful and the easiest to fix aspects.
3. Learn from our competitors and differentiate ourselves
We took a look around at other competitor products to check their mental model, value propositions, business model, feature-sets and design patterns. That also proved to us that merging memory saving and development tracking activities could give us a good potential.
4. Mapping the mental model with card sorting
In order to design the screen flow we needed more information about the mental model for memory saving and development tracking activities. Through card sorting based on content types we were able to flesh it out.
We learnt that they wanted to make a story out of every event, especially the significant milestones.
5. Iterate on the prototype with usability tests
At this stage, having gathered and analysed insights — and identified needs that we thought we could address — we were ready to start sketching, testing and iteratively building up solutions. After every four tests we discussed with the team the usability issues and their severity, and we concluded with the possible solutions together.
The main interaction: Add a new memory
The primary use case of the site is to add content, so we decided to use one main input field on the dashboard for all the memories and milestones, in order to let the users focus on the most important interaction. Based on the usability tests it turned out that we wanted to many decisions from the users at one time.
So we used a two-step interaction instead: add content and define content type. That worked well.
Privacy
We dedicated a separate menu for moms and dads for tracking their moods and to write private stories. A detailed user management helped the users to set access rights for kids’ content. That also solved the patchwork family issues.
Be friendly but not childish: Designing brand identity, UI and interactions
We all agreed that this web app is for parents and not for kids. So we avoided childish illustrations and colours. Bebino should behave and communicate as a nanny: being friendly, family oriented, smart and clean.
We asked for feedback from the users by a five second test, so we ended up with the ‘pineapple and mint’ design.
The last two weeks were dominated by the designers: colouring the system, designing onboarding and main interactions. Bebino is under development now so I will add the link of the site in the near future. Keep an eye open for the update ;). Check out the high fidelity prototype here.
LEARNINGS AND TAKE AWAY
- Kill your darlings: as we involved our client in research sessions it was easier to make design decisions together and kill useless features.
- Design for real life: by listening to parents we learned that parenting is not all about happiness, so with their help we could create a product for real life.
If you liked this case study, you might also like another one I wrote about designing for fashion influencers. Your feedback is valuable and helps me improve what I’m doing, get in touch kissagnes@gmail.com or www.agneskiss.com
