Overview
KidsFirst is committed to helping separated or divorced parents manage ongoing co-parenting matters and helping kids from separated families receive balanced care from both parents.
As an early stage startup, KidsFirst aims to define and develop a minimum viable product (MVP) to address common co-parenting issues.
I worked with the founder, a product manager and fellow designers on this project.
MY ROLE
Product Designer
SPACE
Family Services
TOOLS
Kanban, Trello, Miro, Figma
TIMEFRAME
3 Months
Understand the problem
1 in 3 marriages could be expected to end in divorce. 49% of divorce involving children under 18 years.
— Research Articles from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)
01. Desktop Research
While sharing the duties and responsibilities of parenting collaboratively can serve the best interest of the child, it requires high commitment and communication from both parents, and could involve issues like abuse, high conflict, or a lack of willingness to cooperate from one or both parents.
87% of co-parents deemed communication as one of the top problems.
— Insights From Early Market Research
02. Stakeholder Interview
The founder shared the insights from a market research with 685 potential users, whose ages range from 25-54.
It is worth noting that although some co-parents have experienced financial disputes, we decided to look into this at a later stage due to limited resources and legal & regulatory considerations.
What are the common tasks, conversations, behaviors, emotions and obstacles for co-parents?
03. 1 on 1 Interviews
After gaining the “big picture”，I looked into previous 1:1 interview recordings with 5 separated or divorced co-parents and the reddit co-parenting community to map out their common behaviors, typical tasks, the obstacles they faced in the process and their current ways to tackle the problems.
Major pain points
Lack of facilitation in reaching agreements on kids’ matter
Waiting for response from the other co-parent can be long, questions may get skipped or ignored and communication may stop at any time due to abusive language or busy working schedule.
Hard to plan activities for kids
Due to no clear establishment of timelines or requirements, planning activities for kids is difficult.
No easy way to access documents and information related to the kids
There’s no easy way to access documents such as medical records or vaccine records. Occasions when these files are needed are often time-sensitive.
No easy way to keep track of agreements and planned activities
It’s hard to go back and look through chat histories to find agreed matters. Also there’s no effective reminders to help co-parents remember kids related activities.
I also created two primary personas to represent the goals and needs, typical behaviors and major pain points of co-parents.
Define the MVP
Using the value proposition canvas, we came up with some potential features. We also conducted comparative analysis of the main competitors in the market.
Then along with the founder and product manager, we defined the scope of our MVP:
Communication Facilitator;
Shared Calendar;
Document Repository.
And mapped out the User Story.
Design the solution
Document Repository Feature
I was mainly in charge of designing the document repository feature.
Problem Statement
There's no easy way for co-parents to have shared access to documents and files related to the children such medical records and vaccine records. Occasions when these files are needed are often timely. e.g. documents required for school applications or medical emergencies.
Design Decisions
Before I started designing, I looked into document features offered by direct competitors, however, the features are generally very rough and basic.
So I turned to replacement competitors that offer file management and sharing functions such as Google Drive and OneNote and started to ideate.
The main jobs to be done (JBTD) of the document repository include :
Easy to upload & share documents / photos of kids
Quick access to relevant documents in an emergency
Easy access to routines, food preferences, allergies or medications of kids
To speed up the development process, there’s no search function across the APP. Personalized tags are not available as well.
How can we help co-parents locate relevant documents when they need them the most?
We conducted another round of research on important documents for kids, and divided them into the following catergories: identity, school, medical, travel, expense, insurance and legal documents.
We decided to use them as prebuilt tags. Co-parents can add tags when they upload documents and locate specific document by filtering kids and / or tags.
We also looked into popular document scanning applications and mapped the user flows.
Validation & Iterations
Another designer and I led the usability testing of the prototype of the whole app. We tested the prototype with 5 co-parents, mapped out the common themes and made relevant recommendations.
For the document repository feature
5/5 users uploaded and shared documents easily
5/5 users checked new documents shared from the other co-parent easily
4/5 users located & editied specified document easily
And they think the process is intuitive and clear.
“That's pretty intuitive, nothing else to click .”
“It's great that you can upload multiple pages under one document”
“It take me directly to the document and it shows which is new”
Final product
Document Repository Feature
upload & share easily
Co-parents can upload relavant photos, files from the phone directly or scan multi-page documents on hand. They can also add prebuilt tags to each document.
Easy access to vital files
Documents are arranged by the last opened date by default. Co-parents can locate specific documents by filtering kids or/and tags.
Notification on updates
When the other guardian share a document, co-parent will receive an in-app notification and will be directed to the relevant document.
Next steps
Align design patterns across the app, conduct usability testing of the latest iterations and make relevant changes
Hand off the design files for developers
Measure success metrics include app download counts; user registration counts and daily active (logged in) users
Reflections
Constraints help us focus on designing the key features and save us from designing something that will be too difficult or time consuming to develop
It’s important to clarify and align definitions of certain terms with other designers, stakeholders and product managers
Design for inclusiveness & scalability. Both illustrations and functions should cater for different scenarios and scale easily