Refining Design Concepts w/ Insights + Principles
Following our intensive brainstorming session, we took a step back to ask ourselves how our many ideas might fit with the insights we’d culled from initial research. While we felt good about the general direction, we thought more clearly articulated insights might help guide the rest of our process.
INISIGHTS
Bedtime is a microcosm of parenting
When parents succeed at bedtime routines, they feel like good parents, when they struggle, it feels like a global parenting failure.
Parents feel bad interrupting positive behavior
When it’s time to transition into a bedtime routine, parents feel badly interrupting positive behavior (like calm play) to transition into bedtime. Parents don’t want to feel like they are punishing children when moving them into a bedtime routine.
Parents are always looking for moments of independence
Where possible, parents are always looking for opportunities to handover responsibility to their children, both as a way to free up their time as well as to build responsibility in their growing children.
Transitional moments are points of friction
The moment, from after-dinner-play to bedtime routine, produces anxiety in parents because they are concerned about cascading lateness (bath, teeth brushing, story, and ultimately sleeping). Transitions are tough for kids who don’t like being told what to do, or stopping the fun of play.
FAMILY NEEDS & DESIGNER INTEREST
From our insights, we looked to identify where the needs of our intended audience (parents and children) intersected with our interests within the problem space. From there, we settled on three need areas we were interested in addressing through our solution.
- Easing transitional moments (from playtime to bedtime routine) — less friction between parents and children leads to better sleep for both parents and children
- Making parents feel like good parents — create meaningful moments to bond with children around bedtime; help children to become more independent/take increasing responsibility for bedtime activities as they mature. This would both increase time available for parents to do other things as well as make them feel like successful parents as their kids become increasingly responsible, reducing overall stress and anxiety about parenting.
Keeping these need areas in mind, we sketched out several scenarios where we might be able to intervene. The solutions we developed were:
- A VR guide that would help children take responsibility for parts of their bedtime routine, involving parents only as needed and for meaningful bedtime moments.
- An interactive path that guides children through their bedtime routine, making the transition fun as well as training them to more independently manage bedtime activities.
- An interactive object that would help a parent remotely coordinate and monitor their child’s movement through a bedtime routine.
- An interactive drawing board that would provide a calming transitional activity for children to engage in prior to bedtime.
- A vibrating wrist-band that alerts parents when their behavior is out of line with their longer term parenting goals, particularly around bedtime routine.
- An interactive plant that visualizes the physical and mental health of a child and communicates that information to parents.
We presented these initial ideas to Mark Choi and Peter Weeks from Phillips, as well as Austin, and got feedback on our specific concepts and general direction.
The element of training emerged as an interesting area for further exploration. Mark Choi suggested that we think about how our solution might train both parents and children in positive bedtime routines. For children, this might mean learning to navigate changing routines as they age or adjusting to sleeping in new places (at school, etc). For parents, a training tool might help them learn to manage the bedtime routine of their first child, or the changes that come with a multi-child family as well as navigate the impact these changes would have on their own sleep.
Austin suggested that we think critically about getting hyper-focused about the need we were solving, considering the other components as our solution and outcome. For example, if we simplified our goal to easing transitional moments, we could begin to see a training tool (of some sort) as the solution, with making parents feel like good parents being the outcome of that solution.
From there, we worked to concretize a few design principles that would guide our next stage of ideation.
DESIGN PRINCIPLES
Focus on transitions
A seamless transition to bedtime can mean the difference between a restless sleep for both parent and child and a peaceful night of healthy sleep. Though it may not seem like the most interesting part of the bedtime routine, it is ripe with opportunity to facilitate an easy transition that will set up the rest of the routine for success.
Build independence, but not at the cost of bonding moments
While parents are eager for opportunities to build independence in their children, this shouldn’t come at the expense of the meaningful moments parents and children spend together around bedtime. While technology can certainly support healthy bedtime routines, there are some things that should be left to the humans.
Grow with the child
Much more than bedtime changes as a child grows, and we acknowledging the many changes they are going through, beyond simply a more independent bedtime routine, is important to healthy development. A technological solution to aid bedtime routine should consider these many changes, adapting both content and interaction to meet the changing needs of a growing child. For example, in addition to becoming less directly involved (as the child gains skills and independence) the form of a technological agent could change with the child’s intellectual capabilities.
From these design principles, we went back to our shortlisted ideas (storyboarded above) to arrive at the 3 final concepts we would take to higher fidelity for use in our second round of interviews.
REFINED CONCEPTS
Guiding the Way
Eyes on the Prize
Bedtime Board + Mobile App
