Product/Parent Fit
Becoming a parent changes the way you see the world, but it also changes you. So why don’t the products you use change with you?
Becoming a parent is a fundamental shift in your identity, one that will influence your behaviors, needs, and sense of self for decades to come. Yet most, if not all, major consumer tech products don’t treat parenthood this way. At most it’s a field in a database — likely parent, likely mother — but beyond slightly better ad targeting, this data isn’t used to make my experience with the product better. And how could it? These are systems designed for hundreds of millions of generic human beings.
We’re taking a different approach. We’re building a product that acknowledges and embraces this huge, fundamental identity shift. Winnie is designed to not only be useful to parents, but to make them feel good about being parents.
Re-thinking Photo Sharing
We had a chance to put this into practice as we worked on our newest product, photo sharing. Parents take thousands of pictures of their children, at every place they go with their families. These photos are not just adorable and treasured, they are exceptionally valuable to other parents seeking information about those places.
But when we surveyed parents, we found that many shared photos less after having kids. Their biggest concern was privacy, especially when children’s faces are visible in the pictures. We knew right away that it would be important to have a way to cover the faces, and to put this feature front and center in the UI.
I also wanted to make sure that the photos would still be cute and delightful, so I created some illustrated masks that you could place over the children’s faces. We immediately knew we were on the right track — the photo was anonymized, but also decorative and fun.
So we designed a photo editor that puts these illustrations front and center, and makes it easy to add them to multiple photos at a time. We also provide an option that uses face detection to automatically cover the faces in the photo with cute animal masks. The end result is a photo sharing product that’s both fun and safe, designed end-to-end for the unique needs of parents.
But don’t take my word for it. Check it out and let us know what you think!
