Ten months ago I started an Interaction Design Specialization from UC San Diego through Coursera.
Here’s my experience with the Capstone Project:
Child rearing can be difficult, especially when you’re child is now a teen and you’re a working parent.
I’m interested in how technology could facilitate communication between parents and teens while they’re apart, so I made this my theme for the Interaction Design Capstone Project and worked on an app that would provide clear, easy and reliable communication between both of them, making the whole experience more pleasant.
Defining an idea for an app from the brief was my first challenge, at first I wanted a solution for everything and was having trouble defining a product. Searching for similar apps didn’t help either (at this first stage), I was feeling somewhat discouraged that there were a few apps that already did what I was thinking of.
Observing teens and working parents helped a lot for the ideation process, also reading the reviews for the similar apps and finding out what the users hated about them.
That’s when I decided to focus on one single thing, eliminating the annoying question for teens and parents Where are you? Giving the parents the calm and reassuring information they need to know regarding the whereabouts of their teen and giving the teen a more pleasant and easy way to answer this.
After this, things began to consolidate, Heuristic Evaluations were very helpful in fine tuning usability aspects, a lot more changes were done as a result of testing it out with real users.
Changes like including a 911 option to the Get Help option or adding a voice mail option to the messages screen. This also made me aware of some confusion regarding the check in feature and further adjustments to navigation.
After this phase came the A/B user testing, these were done with usertesting.com
This test was awesome! Really liked the whole experience and insight gained from it. Got some great feedback from my users that helped me confirm the Check in feature and led me to some adjustments to the Messages option.
To take this to the final version I would still make a few adjustments and iterate more on the look and feel of it.
Link to the final version for the capstone project:
App Summary
What this process and testing helped me achieve, was an app that offers a unique proposition:
A very simple, easy and reliable way for teens to answer the Where are you? question by either:
Directly checking in or sending a message with the location automatically added.
The Are you OK? was answered with the Emergency Help feature.
Promote trust and responsibility by not tracking your whereabouts automatically.
Where are they? Parents can also Check in and let their teens know where they are.
