Livin-Nanny
Team
Nicole Li
Mengyu Wun
Duration
4 weeks
My Role
UX/UI Designer
Secondary Research, Ideation,
Physical Prototyping,
Interactive Wireframing,
High-fidelity Prototyping
My Contributions
Created physical prototypes with Lego and cardboard to mimic interaction in a living space and identify channels and touch points in taking care of a newborn.
Designed interactive wireframe and high-fidelity prototypes for evaluation and usability testing.
Conducted a competitive analysis on baby care applications and identified their lacking features to fulfill users needs.
The Problem
Loads of tasks and emergency situations cause challenges for new parents to take care of newborns when they are already in an uneasy situation with constant anxiety and messy sleeping schedules.
Our Solution
With Livin-Nanny, we support new parents to live a smoother caretaking life by a cross-channel solution with parenting guidance and management among different baby care devices.
Photo by William Fortunato
Research
Our project started with a broad direction of helping new parents to take care of newborns. We first narrowed down our scope through research.
Quick User Research: Because of the time constraint and heavy focus on the prototype of this course, I researched through literature review, reviewed parenting and baby online social groups and forums, and communicated with some forum users. This way, I can still get qualitative data without spending time on steps such as recruiting participants for interviews.
Research Goals:
Understand the user journey of parenting newborns
Analyze baby-care relating products
Identify feasible direction to work on
Methods:
Literature review
Communication in new parent online groups and forums
We discovered 3 potential areas:
With further secondary research, we identified:
Tight schedules, various tasks, and emergency situations are especially hard for new parents without experience.
Sleep deficiency is almost unavoidable in the first 6 months when the baby is still establishing a sense of time and often wake up few times at night.
Newborns need routines to establish a sense of secure and their inborn biological clock.
Many smart baby products don’t have cross-platform connection, which is less efficient and effective for parents to use.
Many technologies are tackling parents’ anxiety of baby safety and health. But it’s difficult for users to trust them enough or get a sense of security.
Research Conclusion
We chose the direction of easing new parents who lack related experience and knowledge into their caregiver role by tackling 3 main challenges:
Multi-tasking, repetitive preparations
Lacking experience
Inefficient use of smart devices
Primary user group: New parents without much experience who use smart baby care products
Secondary user group: Caregivers who use smart baby care products and want to take care of babies more efficiently
Ideation
We came up with the idea of a mobile app that can manage different smart baby devices and support users with baby care guidance. We created physical prototypes to refine our ideas in scenarios from understanding the interactions among users, devices, and the home space.
3 questions that we wanted to ascertain are:
What devices need to be involved in daily routine, and how do they communicate?
How do devices communicate with the user?
How would users react to the devices?
Prototyping
Our team made a Lego and cardboard prototype of a kitchen and bedroom in a typical apartment setting, and created the scenario of one of the most important routines, feeding a newborn.
Key Insights:
Device communication: All smart baby devices should be managed by Livin-Nanny mobile app, the central controller, directly. They work based on the routine time set in the app.
Device-user interaction: The app should send a notification of completion of a requested task and status of the connected devices to the user in real-time.
Users cannot constantly check their phones when they are taking care of babies, so a wearable device, such as a smartwatch, will be better for getting notifications.
Evaluation
We further created a smartwatch prototype and a low-fidelity prototype for the app to evaluate with potential users in three essential scenarios:
Setting up a whole day routine in the morning.
Feeding the baby.
Fixing the disconnected devices.
Fig. Livin-Nanny mobile app prototype
Fig. Smartwatch prototypes
Fig. Evaluation in scenarios
Key Findings:
For first-time newborns' parents, it's helpful to have a recommended routine with main tasks set up in the first place as guidance. Users can adjust task time and specific connected devices by themselves.
Setting up an all-day routine every day in the app is redundant and unnecessary.
The participant would only fix the connection right away if she needed the device immediately.
Changes after evaluation
Adding a baby profile page to get basic baby information and collect body data from smart sleeping suits or socks. Livin-Nanny will recommend users of advisory routines as the baby grows up. In this way, parents can struggle less about figuring out the best routine for their babies.
A notification will be sent out again on smartwatch and phone in 30 min before the device is needed if the app detects that it is not fixed yet.
A disconnection mark icon will stay in the mobile app to remind users when the device is disconnected.
Final Design
I designed the final interactive prototype according to feedback from the evaluation with attention to the visual hierarchy and affordance to the user. For example, changing the colors of the components to indicate if the function is active, changing icons from "plus" to "tick" to show the setting is done, and creating primary and secondary action buttons to direct users and prevent errors.
Adjust to the best routine for your baby
Input basic baby info to use a recommended routine and view parenting tips. Livin-Nanny modifies personalized routines as the baby grows up.
Livin-Nanny does the preparation
Adjust desired devices for different activities, and Livin-Nanny will have everything prepared when you need it.
Manage all smart baby devices at once
No more lost in different apps or emergency situations caused by accidentally disconnected devices. Livin-Nanny will also notify you when connection issues happen, and remind again 30 min before the disconnected device’s next task if you haven’t fixed it.
Grasp all progress without your phone
When you are comforting your baby and don't have an extra hand on the phone, you can pair Livin-Nanny with a wearable device to get everything updated.
Takeaways
In this project, we focused on the cross-channel experiences enabled by the Internet of Things. To understand the interaction between many physical and digital channels, I tried prototyping during ideation for the first time. I realized that prototyping is not only a tool for evaluation but also a way to raise questions and explore. For example, I found out from prototyping that categorizing devices by room was not so useful since users are not always placing feeding products in the kitchen. It helped me simulate the scenarios and take a holistic approach to the whole system.
Next Step
Refine the color choice according to the WCAG2 standards.
Look into more ways of helping the users by using the connected smartwatch because it allows users to control the app without an extra hand to hold their phone!
Credit
Due to our tight schedule, we used free icons for device connection screen from Flaticon.com. Thank you again!
Attributions have been shared on Twitter as required.