The UX of Parenting
“I feel mad; you made me upset,” my 3-year-old told me as she threw herself down onto the floor. All I did was suggest she get ready for bed following our normal bedtime routine: potty, bath, pajamas, brush and floss her teeth.
I told her, “It’s OK to be mad, and sometimes I feel upset too. Take a minute to feel upset. But then we need to find a way to keep doing what we need to do tonight. You might still be upset while we get ready for bed, but we need to do bedtime. Can you tell me why you feel upset? How might we make bedtime more enjoyable for you?”
In this moment I realized I was UX workshopping my kid.
I left my career as an academic librarian and started working as a UX researcher when my daughter was a year old, so I’ve grown as a UXer and as a parent in parallel.
I don’t consider myself a parenting expert, but I’ve noticed certain UX principles can be applied to the art of child rearing.
According to the Interaction Design Foundation, there are 5 steps to the UX design process:
1. Empathize
2. Define
3. Ideate
4. Prototype
5. Test
The UX of Parenting looks like this. Let’s use potty training as an example.
1. Empathize
I personally had a hard time understanding why using the potty was something my daughter resisted. When I was 2 or 3 my mom told me it was time to use the potty and I said “OK” and that was the end of it. I’ve always been a very reasonable, get-it-done type of person, in case you were wondering.
My daughter was approaching 3. We had introduced the potty when she started showing signs of emotional and physical readiness, sometime between 2 and 2.5 years. She had used the potty on and off for several months, but then suddenly got to a point where she did not want to anymore.
My partner and I didn’t quite understand what had changed, but we started to dig into the issue: Was our child resistant to using the potty in the presence of a certain parent or was it with both of us? Did this occur only at home, or was it also happening at daycare and grandma’s house? Were other kids in her daycare class experiencing this? Did she just not like the little potty we had available? Was it a typical developmental moment?
2. Define
This is a phase I could linger on — I’m a researcher and my partner is an engineer so we gather tons of data before making any decision.
The standard research methods of interviews and surveys weren’t going to help us define this problem. If you’ve never interacted with a 3-year-old before, they are highly unreliable narrators.
Thankfully the internet is full of parenting resources, so we embarked upon a rigorous round of desk research (Reddit) where other parents reported their successes and failures in potty training. We spoke with family and friends, and parents of classmates. We asked daycare teachers about the circumstances surrounding potty usage (or lack thereof). We observed our toddler’s behavior and made note of any patterns.
3. Ideate / 4. Prototype / 5. Test
These stages seemed to all run in parallel, and occurred multiple times.
Our first idea was to use stickers as a reward for using the potty. That worked for a while until the stickers no longer held appeal.
My partner then bought mini M&Ms to use as incentives. 1 M&M for #1, 2 for #2. This also worked until it didn’t.
Finally, we returned to the stickers, but instead of just giving our daughter stickers every time she used the potty, we combined this in-the-moment reward with short and long term incentives. We made a sticker chart, 30-something circles on the page. On every third circle my partner drew an animal. Our daughter put a sticker on a circle every time she used the potty. When she got to the third circle, she put a sticker on the chart and received a small animal figurine. These “baby animals” were extremely exciting for her. When she filled the potty chart with stickers, she got a “big prize” — going to Target to pick out a new toy.
By that time, using the potty had become routine. We slowly moved away from the sticker chart and baby animals, but our daughter does occasionally still remind us that she needs an M&M.
In UX, you strive to understand and solve user problems, and you iterate to improve designs. As a parent, you also solve a lot of problems. Things you never even knew would be problems until you tried to raise a small human. If you’ve ever wondered whether you would enjoy parenthood, just ask yourself how much you enjoy iterating on your original plan.
This isn’t a UX textbook, or a parenting book, so if I’ve missed anything, drop a comment. Let me know if you find yourself applying UX principles to parenting or if I’m just overthinking this after being sleep deprived for 3 years.
