Lauryn's Portfolio

The Parent Portal

Milestone tracking

Search results

Discoveries

Our interviews taught us the importance of listening and advocating for the user. We made the decision to pivot the scope of the project as a result.

Findings

Both rounds of user testing produced positive results that played a critical role in the design process. Users enjoyed this app and shared their hopes of using it in the future.

Study highlights

Interviews and user testing revealed that participants need clear pathways to retrieving information regarding their child’s health and dislike communicating through a chatbox.

Developing Research
Interviews
Data Analysis
Sprint # 1
Sprint # 2
Prototype
What did I learn?

Developing Research

We believe that parents need support in parenting. So, we use secondary research, and this is what we found. This included finding articles on child-rearing and how parents see their information.

“Our takeaway is that parents wanted evidence-based parenting advice. Based on these articles and a few others.”

We wondered what was out there?

Company Name

Focuses

A comprehensive range of features foocusing on advice to parents

Focuses on child development stages

Focuses on fostering communication between parents and children

Feature

overwhelming, with some users reporting difficulty in navigation

Focused on the child’s milestones and what they are doing at the different months

More of a program and no real human support

Unique

Includes milestone tracking, health tips, and a supportive community

Provides insights into child's behavior and needs

Focuses on fostering communication between parents and children

Similarities

Focuses on advice for parents from professionals, not regularly updated

Focus on parents understandings for a short time

Teaching parens to communicate well to their kid is important

Lacking

overwhelming, with some users reporting difficulty in navigation

Lacks practical features such as caregiver recommendations

Lacks a strong community aspect, which may limit its appeal

“We decided on the evidence-based parenting application.”

To lead our decisions, we propose

Interviews: Talking to your parents

We wrote a research plan involving initial goals, business goals, interview protocols, and how to handle the sprints. I kept a timeline and deadline sheet with the team.

The timeline ensured we would meet the deadline with room for any inconveniences. Thankful we did! 😁

1. Interviews
These interviews' insights guided the design process, ensuring that the app addressed parents' real needs and concerns. 

2. Sprints
The prototype was then tested in two sprints with four participants per sprint. Feedback from the first sprint was used to refine and edit the prototype for the second sprint.

3. User Testing
User Testing was conducted as early as possible to ensure that usability issues were solved and functionality was intentional. We went through two rounds of testing.

Understanding your parents

We conducted interviews over Zoom to understand our target users' motivations, goals, and pain points. We developed a interview protocol, codebook and mapped our information out in Fig. Jam. (Alias names & photos used)

Your parents told us,

Parents told us. We listened.
So we PIVOT💃🏽.

Analysis: Parent’s core needs

We complied the data from the interviews and narrowed down some key information to help us understand what the parent’s were asking for.

Community

For many participants, having a community and getting advice is the best part of a community. The community aspect was an essential part of parenting.

Trust

The trust gauge from the participants varied but all used disconcertment, and “gut feelings” to distinguish good advice and bad advice or trustworthiness.

Healthcare

Participants valued healthcare professional resources and liked recommendations from parents to help with decisions.

Reviews

Parent that used online communities praised the tools they were given to help raise their child and to hear from experienced individuals.

We change our core statement

Old Goals

To understand the needs and preferences of parents to develop an app that effectively supports them through community connections and valuable resources. While holding aligning with usability standards.

New Goals

To promote Interaction, retention, and engagement of parenting resources, incorporate features that encourage and support parenting lifestyles, and develop a prototype for the application that aligns with usability heuristics.

Layout of the application

A closed card sort was conducted both in-class and offline to gather insights on how users would organize information for the application. This helped us organize and understand the natural grouping of content. Here are the results.

Sprint#1: Wireframing & testing

The sprint lasted 5 days resulting in a low fidelity wireframes of 3 tasks for the project. We then tested the prototype on day 6 & 7. The information below is an example of the key tasks.

Key tasks

Community

For many participants, having a community and getting advice is the best part of a community. The community aspect was an essential part of parenting.

Community is used to connect parents locally and globally to other parents seeking advice. As Marsha states like every other parent,

Sprint#2: High-fidelity

After going through the first sprint we had to clean up and fix the issues that participants were having. We user tested with about 4 parents then established our next sprint. Day 1-5 we developed the application. Day 6 & 7, we tested the application usability.

These are the app pages, community, search, milestones, and reviews.

For many participants, having a community and getting advice is the best part of a community. The community aspect was an essential part of parenting.

Here’s a glimpse of how it
turned out

Tutorial needs

Based on user testing, we felt a tutorial to explain features of the things people were confused about. User testing showed it helped them understand.

Need a search bar?

We included a search bar and saw its ease of user experience. It is to search for people to find what they are looking for. The majority of participants used the search for ease.

Reviews

Reviews are essential for parents, and our participants hinge on reviews from parent Portal, coworkers, family, and other parents.

Community groups

Creating a group function is vital to the user and what they are looking for. The creation of the group will require monitoring, which our participants were delighted about.

What I would do to continue

I would conduct further research on the application and set up associations with beta-testing local groups.
We should diversify the participant pool. Most of our participants were 35 years or older, which is what we had access to.
We should consider implementing other forms of user research, such as first click or tree jack testing.

Explore additional features to evaluate the impact of the app.

What I learned

Target Audience

Our target audience is essential, and we tried but couldn't find mothers who were first-time mothers. Improve strategies to find different types of audiences.

Timing

It was a great move to do those sprints to quickly prototype with feedback from all team members to get it ready for parents we will do usability testing on.

More Clarity

I learned to ask for more clarity in the interviews. This helped to get more insights for these interviews.