Give & Grow : Give away & borrow children's products with play
Project Outcome
User Research informed high fidelity prototype for a MVP mobile application.
What I did
Generative research
Evaluative research
Product strategy
Ideation
Sketching
Prototyping
Visual design
Team
2 UX Researchers & Designers
Vershanjali Chauhan (Me)
Monika Agarwal
2 UX Designers
Nikita Chandekar
Neha Sehgal
1 Product Manager
Ashray Joshi
Tools
Figma
Usertesting.com
Procreate
Google suite
Duration
9 weeks
Scenario
In a world with 24 billion children aged 0 to 14 globally, parents consistently purchase children's products, leading to significant waste when these items are outgrown.
Moreover, there are many families that cannot afford these children's products and find it hard to sustain. There is a relentless cycle of purchasing, discarding, and repeating that perpetuates a cycle of overconsumption, leading to environmental degradation and the burgeoning costs of raising children.
Problem
How might we empower parents to meet the evolving needs of their growing children while concurrently addressing the challenges of cost management and minimizing environmental impact?
Solution
A marketplace that addresses the needs of parents and children through providing a way to donate, sell, buy, accept used children's products.
1
Marketplace: Connect people to donate, accept, buy, sell used children's products
Parents can find used children's products near them, check their AI assigned rating, add them to child's wishlist.
2
Gamified rewards experience: Children gain rewards by learning value based content and sharing their toys etc. with others
Parents can keep a track of values learnt by children, donations done by them and rewards earned.
3
Child zone: Enable children's socio-emotional development through value based content
Children are involved in the process of choosing products or donating their own products by learning empathy through content and gamified experience.
Design Process deep dive
Constraints that we worked with
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Timeline: Operating within the confines of an academic setting, our project faced a tight timeline
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Team Composition: Our project team comprised designers, researchers, and product managers. However, the absence of developers and business stakeholders posed a challenge in terms of holistic collaboration and comprehensive perspectives.
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Research Limitations: Due to time and resource constraints, conducting extensive user recruitment and testing, especially with children, presented a challenge.
DISCOVERY
But, why should we solve this problem?
While this seemed like a problem to us, we wondered if this was a big enough problem to solve and if it mattered to users. To find out about the pressing needs and rationale to solve this problem, we decided to conduct research using Literature Reviews, User Interviews and Competitive Analysis.
Literature review to learn more about the problem
We reviewed research papers on the Toy industry, contribution of products like toys to plastic pollution, parent's struggles with meeting the needs of growing children, role of children in purchasing decisions and children's behavior around using their products.
Literature review insights by the team
Key takeaways - Next steps
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The toy industry is the most plastic intensive industry and contributes to environmental pollution. 40 Million + toys are discarded annually in the US alone.
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Kids Are Engaged Consumers who exert a powerful influence on family purchases.
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Most children get bored with new toys in just 36 days.
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Children do not have complex emotions like empathy and sharing developed when they are young so, they struggle to let go of their old toys to share with others.
RESEARCH
User Interviews
We conducted interviews with 6 Parents through Zoom. All users regularly buy kid's products through both online and offline methods of shopping.
Research goal
To understand how parents buys, sell or exchange children's products and how are children involved in the process?
Affinity mapping of insights
Key takeaways - Next steps
# 1
Parents practice Gamified learning for children through storytelling → Integrate a gamified process with points and rewards to foster children's values understanding.
To Facilitate positive socio-emotional development, the app should incorporate a gamified process involving points and rewards, providing an engaging learning experience for children imitating parent's current practices.
# 2
Holistic purchasing journey → Integrate seamless donation processes and hand-me-down utilization
Supporting parents in managing the evolving needs of their children, the app should include features that facilitate seamless donation processes and encourage the utilization of hand-me-downs.
# 3
Optimized decision-making process → Enhance the app's interface for intuitive decision-making.
To overcome challenges faced by parents, particularly in physical stores, the app's decision-making process should be child-friendly and intuitive, ensuring a smooth and enjoyable shopping experience.
# 4
Balanced buying channels → Optimize the app for online convenience across varied product categories.
Acknowledging parents' preferences for a mix of physical and online shopping, the app should be optimized to provide the convenience of online shopping, catering to different product categories and user preferences.
DISCOVERING BUSINESS PERSPECTIVE
While the user needs this, what is the business's POV?
While this seemed like a problem to us, we wondered if this was a big enough problem to solve and if it mattered to users. To find out about the pressing needs and rationale to solve this problem, we decided to conduct research using Literature Reviews, User Interviews and Competitive Analysis.
Competitive Analysis
We conducted an analysis of 8 competitors focused on Toys within the category of Children's products to understand what problems are these businesses solving and what are they offering.
Lean Business Canvas
Based on all research findings and competitive analysis, we conducted a Lean Business Canvas exercise to strategise a product that considers both user needs and business needs. This helped us identify the user need to solve that can give us an unfair advantage in the market while ensuring that the product provides a profitable business.
Key takeaways - Next steps
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Users need a platform that is more than a marketplace - Design a platform that gives a complete experience of shopping/selling the way the user wants.
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None of the competitors consider the participation of kids in the shopping process - Integrate kid's participation seamlessly in the shopping process.
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None of the competitors allow parents to teach values through donating/giving away/shopping - Integrate Value development through gamification mirroring parents current practices.
What are the big problems and which ones should we prioritize?
To answer this, we used a prioritization matrix that ranked the problems found through research and prioritised the following:
# 1
Managing Finances for Growing Children
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Parents face continuous expenses as children rapidly outgrow their items.
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Limited resale options hinder parents' ability to recover costs.
# 2
Fostering Responsible Consumer Behavior in Children
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Balancing child involvement in item selection with practicality.
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Difficulty in encouraging children to take responsibility and participate in donation.
# 3
Instilling Empathy and Sharing
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Difficult to Involve children in selection and understanding their preferences.
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Need storytelling and games to teach empathy and sharing.
DEFINE
Whom should we solve these problems for?
With the main problems defined, it was imperative to define the User Persona that we are targeting to design for first. As the app will be used by both Parent and Child, we defined a persona for each of them drawing details from user research.
Parent Persona
Child Persona
What should be the Big Picture Product Vision
Bring joy and learning into children's lives by providing products sustainably and cost-effectively while enabling socio-emotional development.
SUCCESS METRICS
How will we know how the app is performing?
# 1
User engagement
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Time Spent in App
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Frequency of Use
# 2
Product transactions
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No. of transactions
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Conversion rate
# 3
Child learning outcomes
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Survey/Feedback on Values
Parent Persona
Child Persona
IDEATION
Feature ideation
We started the ideation by doing brainstorming together on what features does the app should have to meet the needs of it's users.
Brainstorming of Features
SCOPE & MVP
Prioritizing what to design first?
To decide on what we wanted to build in the duration of this project, we used a Feature Priority Matrix.
The project involves creating screens for Parents and Children, focusing on flows for parents to select items for buying, uploading products for donation/selling, creating community posts, involving children through selecting value based content for them to watch, collecting reward points and selecting products.
Defining the MVP as a team using Feature Priority
Converting Features to Information Architecture
Having the prioritized features and scope for the MVP helped us go to the next step of converting the features into blueprint of the application through the Card Sorting technique.
Open Card Sorting to derive Information Architecture
Information Architecture Diagram with Navigation and Content Organization
IDEATION & DESIGN
Sketching out Ideas
Once we had the Information Architecture in place, we moved on to the sketching out the main screens of the app collaboratively as a team using a Whiteboard. Once we finalized a particular design for the screen, we created low-fidelity sketches on Procreate. Then, we converted those screen sketches to rough flows that fulfill the most important tasks.
Sketching out ideas collaboratively on a Whiteboard and Procreate
Low Fidelity sketches for the core user flows
Converting Low Fi sketches to Mid Fidelity Prototype
We created Mid Fidelity Prototypes for 5 core user flows. We conducted in-person Usability Testing for each of these flows with 2 parents. Here are 2 flows to illustrate the process.
Key takeaways - Next steps
# 1
Confusion with Icons and Visuals → Refine iconography that match user’s mental model.
Users expressed uncertainty about the meaning of icons in the bottom navigation and progress bar while uploading a product.
# 2
Discovering Content was hard → Integrate content to make discovery intuitive.
Users were pleasantly surprised by the presence of watchable content. Lack of awareness about the content component.
# 3
Confusion about what to do with Content → communicate the parent's role in managing content for their children.
Users desired clarity on their role as parents in promoting or restricting content.
# 4
Mismatched expectations on shopping experience → Provide more control to match user’s needs.
Users showed positive sentiment towards the shopping flow but didn’t find it intuitive. They expressed mismatch with how the ‘heart’ function works. They want to Wishlist some products for the child to see but have the choice to Wishlist some products that can be kept private to surprise their child.
# 5
Multi-Child Consideration → Provide option to create multiple children profiles.
Users found the flow appealing and expressed interest in using it for multiple children.
VISUAL DESIGN & STYLE GUIDE
Bringing life to the design
We kept a playful and soothing color palette to make the experience delightful for both parent and child users. The Visual Design was used to distinguish between the interface for parent and child users. Use of engaging visuals, micro interactions and conversational language ensures the development of a genuine connection between the product and user.
DESIGN & PROTOTYPING
High Fidelity Screens
USABILITY TESTING
Validating and Iterating the Design
Once our high-fidelity prototypes were built, we used usertesting.com as a medium to quickly test our prototypes as we had limited time and resources to recruit users.
We did 9 usability tests for the built prototype over usertesting.com where the testing audience was filtered based on the audience being parents of children between the ages of 3 to 8 who own a smartphone and could record themselves.
After 9 rounds of testing, the team took cumulative insights by observing the user’s expressions, the screen, and how they interact with the application, and taking the responses received from each of the questions. We did 3 rounds of testing, drew insights and iterated the prototype at each stage.
A screenshot of Usertesting.com illustrating the user responses from Usability Testing
Key takeaways - Next steps
# 1
Visibility and Identification Challenges → Implement clearer visual cues
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Users struggled to identify the +(add) button and the wishlist (heart) icon.
# 2
Usability Issues → Solve Usability problems and provide more control to the user
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Issues with incorrect age grouping when uploading products, and users expressed the need to review their product posts before posting.
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Confusion arose about colors indicating path completion and pending product donations.
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Users faced difficulty understanding the toggle icon for switching between parent and child views. Confusion persisted about receiving feedback on task completion when adding content to a child's playlist.
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Users did not observe the mall getting unlocked and experienced confusion about the actions a child needs to take once the mall is unlocked.
# 3
No clear purpose of the app → Refine the navigation flows and make the experience intuitive
Users not sure how the different aspects relate to each other.
# 4
Parents need more freedom to select watch time → Provide more options and control to parents
Users were not sure if they would want their child to watch large amount of content to unlock the products page.
# 5
Apprehension about negative gratification → Work with psychologists to design a positive gamification experience for kids while providing more control to parents
Users find the idea of completing tasks to open rewards with appropriate things to obtain meaningful but are apprehensive of initiating the habit of only doing these things for more toys.
Final Prototype
We did multiple iterations based on user feedback and came up with the final prototype.
Results
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Successfully tested and prototyped 6 core task flows of the app and came with specific insights and corrective actions.
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Built the exchange marketplace, community and rewards tracking page for users who are parents.
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Integrated storytelling for children through the use of engaging color palette, visuals, story based content, gamification through rewards and including them in the process of sharing.
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Validated solutions generated through user research by testing the concept with users.
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High fidelity prototype for mobile screens and visual design for iPad screens for child users.
Reflection
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As a designer, next time I would work on framing questions better, going to the depth of the problem and learning about perspectives of diverse kind of users.
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Some things to be considered:
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Safety: Creating a safe exchange experience is essentials in this domain for both parents and kids.
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Perspectives of Children: Researching with children can provide better insights in designing the experience as they drive parent's motivation.
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Values: Considering emotional experiences of the users brings value to the product differentiating the product in a generic transactional market.
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Future recommendations
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Device flexibility: Ipad version for child as children mostly used iPads.
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User Delight: Add Micro interactions, sound & reduce data to make it more interesting for children
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Gamification system: Strategise a proper rewards, points and value system that is easy for users to understand.
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Top notch storytelling: Interactive content design to integrate engaging storytelling for both parents and kids that draws inspiration from the storytelling currently used by parents organically.
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Research: Contextual inquiry with children, testing with children, user research with users who struggle with affordability of children's products, diary studies with parents.