Buddly – Cathy Zhang

INTRODUCTION

Role: User Research, Ideation, Sketching & wireframing, Branding, UI Design, User Testing, Iteration

Timeline: 10 weeks

Platform: IOS

Buddly is an online community designed to help parents organize playdates and connect with other parents so they can share information and exchange advice with one another.

Buddly also creates a personal space in which parents can keep track of every milestone that they share with their babies.

This case study was completed over the course of 10-weeks as part of the BrainStation full-time UX program.

PROTOTYPE

Click to Interact!

THE PROBLEM

Young parents are often struggling with taking care of new-borns due to their lack of experience and challenge of transitioning into parenthood. Infants require extra care and nurture in the early years, especially when they are unable to communicate clearly with the parents.
Parents often face lack of sleep, conflict between spouse, over- whelming chores, and excessive anxiety and stress during this phrase. They are more likely to make mistakes or simply feeling lost when providing care for their infant.

"How Might We help new parents be better at providing care for their infant while feeling less stressful and having more emotional support? "

RESEARCH

With a clearly defined question in mind, I conducted secondary research first to get a preliminary understanding of the problem before i started on the actual user interviews. Then I prepared a user research plan that involves making a list of assumptions and developling an interview script with targeted questions.

I then found 5 participants that are new parents or more experienced parents between the age of 20 - 40 and they are either the husband or the wife. All participants are coming from different demographic locations and cultural background. The more experienced parents are limited to the ones that have pre-schoolers instead of older children and they are not limited to single child parents.

Here's what I found out.

50%

New parents suffer complete knock in confidence

1/6

New parents dont start to enjoy parenthood until after baby's first birthday

52%

Feel they've lost identity after having a child

80%

New parents miss leaving the house and having more social life

75%

Feel they have to carve new circle of friends who have children too

100%

Think that there are lack of opportunities for them to meet more parents

INSIGHTS

Based on the in-person interviews, I concluded the insights into 3 key themes:

Experience of transitioning into parenthood:

Most parents reflected that the actual experience was different from what they have anticipated even when they have done preparation. Common resources for information are books, online research and classes. When they face uncertainties, they tend to take the trial and error approach and follow with their instinct before they become more experiened.

Social life pattern after the baby was born:

Social life was challenged for the first few months due to lack of energy and time, but became more active after the baby is older. Most parents think it’s necessary to make friends with other parents for both physical and emotional support. Another motivation for expanding their friend circle is to allow their baby to be surrounded with more children. However, they think it’s difficult to find other new parents and hard to search for the right parents community.

Common Reactions when handling with stress:

During stressful times, most parents are likely to seek help and support from their friends and family members. Some choose to deal with the problem by themselves because they think their friends might not relate to their problem. Those who did seek for support generally felt better afterwards, but also finds that sometimes it takes some time for their friend to fully understand their concern.

PERSONA

"Janice Jackson" is created to represent the real users from the research. She helps me to always remember and stay focused on the specific attributes and the needs of the users throughout my design process.

EXPERIENCE MAP

In order to find out the areas of opportunities where the product can interwine with the user's life. I mapped out an usual day of Janice from the morning until the night to get a better picture of how I can help her to tackle her pain points as a new parent.

USER STORIES & CORE EPICS

Based on the areas of opportunities, I tried to brainstorm as many user stories as possible to further explore Janice's needs and how I can design something that truly helps her. Then I grouped the user stories into 4 core epics which showed me the final directions of the product that i will be building.

1. Online Interactions & Information Exchange: users want to exchange insights and share experiences through questions and answers as well discussing about certain topics through posting and commenting

2. Connecting with other Parents users: Users wish to be exposed to more parents communities and have more opportunities to make new friends with other parents.

3. Join or host playdates: Other than the online community, users also want to host or join playdates to build more in person interactions.

4. Capturing and sharing memories: Users like to have a personalized space to post journals and photos about their baby and keep track of special memories and milestones

SKETCHING

I started to sketch out those ideas and played around with the layout and the key features.

USABILITY TESTING

Starting from the initial sketches, I conducted three rounds of user testings to validate my design decisions and also pin point the areas that do not work. Iterations are carried out after each round of user testing.