Overview

Research
Design
What I learned

Overview

PROBLEM

Parents have difficulty to schedule a visit with their friends in order to hang out with the kids due to busy routine. At the same time, COVID made it difficult to meet in person.

SOLUTION

To address this problem, we created a Linkie app : mobile app that sends recording messages to interact with the kids and paired with a physical toys.

Duration

2 Weeks

Role

UI / UX Designer

Team

1 Founder
2 Designers
2 Developers

Tool

Figma
Photoshop
Protopie
HOW IT WORKS

APPLICATION

The app displays the stored recording message on the children’s toy and controls the recording remotely.

TOYS

The toys is held by the baby. And the button will flash if someone send a message to there. It captures baby attention and trigger them click on it.
PROBLEM

Relatives and family friends want to maintain a relationship with a child, but can’t because the child's parents do not always have time to schedule the visits and are not always available to be physically present for a visit.

SOLUTION

Linkie is a mobile app that allows guardians to manage the relationship of loved ones and their children while also providing a new way of communication through recorded messages sent to a child's toy. Community management and privacy are some of the most important points we focused on based on our user research. Our application encourages users to release permission to the adults they want to message their children. Linkie also provides actionable and personable visit permission based on users’ preferences, and helps resolve permission requests from other families.

MY PROCESS

01

Research
  • Stakeholder Interviews
  • Survey
  • User Interviews
  • Persona

02

Design
  • Problem Statment
  • “HMW” Brainstorming
  • Impact & Effort Matrix
  • Interactive Prototype

03

Evalute
  • Usability Testing
DESIGN OUTCOME
01
Onboarding Guidline
Creating a seamless onboard and app introduction is essential for first time user retention.
02
Guest Invitation
Users can invite their friends and family members to join their “Guest list”. Those on the guest list can send messages to the children whenever they want without hesitation.
03
Device Remote Monitor
Users can monitor visits with their children by checking the messages family and friends send them. They can reassign or delete any message being sent to their child.

01

Research

01Research

Client Goals

Stakeholder Interview

We started on interviewing the stakeholder to understand Linkie’s business goal and the target audiences.

Problem Hypothesis: Loved ones can’t always physically be in a child's life, but still want to connect with that child.

Solution Need: Relatives and family friends want a better way to connect with the little ones they love even when guardians are not available to facilitate communication. Linkie allows relatives and family friends to bypass the need for guardian help and communicate directly with the child.

Target Audience: Parents and Grandparents

Frustration: IF they do want to speak to a child, that communication has to facilitated by and directed through a parent or guardian.

After laying out the stakeholder’s goal, I need to validate the idea by coming up with an actionable design solution. Therefore, I began to research the problem and started with the user perspective.

Defining User Needs

Survey

After gaining an understanding of what our product currently offers, I then sent out a few surveys to better understand the problem space.
Quantitative results allowed me to 1) have a better understanding of the target audience 2) identify the areas to target for insights and 3) quickly validate the stakeholder's audience hypothesis.
Participants who have visited friend’s or other family member’s children.
Participants who wait more than 30 minutes for permission to visit with a family member's or friend's child.
Visit permission have been denied before
‍

User Interview

After confirming the need for an innovative way to schedule child visits with friends and family members, I then conducted semi-structured interviews to get a better understanding on:
  • What is the main cause of users’ frustrations?
  • What have they done to overcome this situation?
  • What do they need?
  • How can we help?
  • What is the best way to grant and obtain permission?
Some Interesting Quotes I Found
Recommendations
Scheduling

“It takes too long to get a response sometimes, I feel like it should have a simpler way to communicate with the child.”

“I used to be happy when my friend wants to come and visit me. Now I am exhausted when I hear it since I need to ask for a day off. ”

Scheduling

“It would be nice to have the remote monitor on my phone.”

“I never know what gonna happen at that day. And need to reschedule again and again : ( ”

Affinity map grouping the themes found in our interview data

We found that among the people who visit the childrens of others often
have childrens of their own.

Key Takeaways

Based on the Survey & Interview results, I narrowed down few takeaways with the map.
01

Visitor usually do not plan in advance to meet other’s children.

Visitors want quick response for impromptu visit. They find it tiring to ask for guardian’s help each time.
02

Visitors are primarily someone the guardian knows.

As we can see from the results, the visitors usually are the guardian’s friends or other family members who are tied with a strong relationship between them.
03

Guardians worry about what others say to their child.

Every time a friend or other family member comes to see the child, guardians feel the need to monitor the entire visit. They are concerned the visitor could say something inappropriate or encourage a child's bad behavior.
04

Guardians spend too much time and effort scheduling the visits.

Guardian finds it difficult to arrange visits around family and friends schedules. After finally scheduling a visit, sudden changes or cancellations can come up and cause the process to repeat all over again.

Persona

From the gathered information, I was able to identify the target audience. I realized that there were two audiences: the guardian managing the visits and the friends or family members visiting. This allowed me to look back at my research’s key findings and the stakeholder’s goals to create two user personas to represent the findings and target audiences.
The need of guardians and visitors was actually on the two ends of a balance: visitors request to facilitate the in-person visiting while guardians need to see where this can fit into the schedule.

Primary Stakeholder

Parents of Children

“I am working on my Full-time job and it is difficult to be physically there with child whenever friends want to communicate with him.”

Needs:

  • A convenient way to monitor the visiting process.
  • Help with visit scheduling.

Frustrations:

  • Worried about always rejecting friends visits because of schedule conflicts
  • Hard to keep in touch with all the friends who want to visit
  • Hard to schedule a visit that works with  both.

Best Friend of a Single Mum

“I need a more effective and efficient way to  communicate with my best friend's child and a way to get quick response for scheduling a visit. I loved to talk to them both. ”

Needs:

  • A way to bypass the need for a guardian during visits.
  • Help with visit scheduling.

Frustrations:

  • Exhausting to ask permission every time.
  • Need to plan ahead for the visit; otherwise the visit schedule usually fails.
  • Cannot successfully schedule a visit every time.

02

DESIGN

Finding the right problem to solve

Based on all the above information, we found that there are actually two fundamental problems:
  • Finding time to schedule visits with family and friends
  • Finding time as the guardian to be there when others visit
In addition to finding time being a problem, research showed that in-person visits were the most common form of growing close to the child. However, finding time was not the only problem, not only because of 1)the busy schedules of both groups, but also 2)COVID has made in person visits difficult.

Problem Statement

After creating user personas and defining the right direction of our problem, I formulated the problem statement.
Relatives and family friends want to maintain a relationship with a child, but they can’t because parents do not always have time to schedule the visit and parents are not always available to be physically present.

“HMW” Brainstorming

Based on the finding we collected from user research, I conducted a brainstorming session using the "HMW" brainstorming method to try and find the best solutions.
How might we bypass the need of physical presence from parents / guardians?
How might we reduce the effort it takes to schedule a visit with parents?
Therefore, my design will include solutions that:
Does not require In-Person Interactions to maintain relationship
Does not require Long Time Commitments

Impact  / Effort Matrix

After establishing the direction of the design solution, we are able to brainstorm out many possible ideas. I invited one of the members of our engineer team to join this session, to better inform the construction aspects of the app. Together we completed an Impact & Effort Matrix to make the final solution more convincing and feasible .
In the end, I decided to pursue the following solution spaces based on the high impact to low effort ratio:
1. Remote Control
2. Voice Recording
3. Shareable Device
Finally, I decided to use a mobile app to deliver the above functions to users. I also thought about creating a web product. However, after additional market research, I found that mobile phone users are rapidly increasing in comparison with web users. From a market perspective, we decided to build an app will achieve the above functions and also build an important bridge between physical devices.

Information Architecture

User Flow

For a more comprehensive look into the site needs, I brainstormed the information architecture of our user flow individually, before meeting as a group and coming up with the following user flow:

Wireframe

Base on the Information Architecture, I sketched out my idea for Linkie's online look and created a Low Fidelity Prototype.

Sketches

I drew out sketches of the monitor control functions with the team to make sure that everyone’s on the same page.

Wireframes

We created the following wireframes as we prepared for the next round of user testing.

Evaluation & Iteration

User Testing

After making the wireframes, I didn't immediately begin the process of making a high fidelity prototype. Instead, I used the existing wireframes and asked three of my peers to conduct the User Testing. I collected their feedbacks in order to do design Iteration.

Recording File Page - Category

Adding a category tab on top would be helpful for users to manager their recording files since some users complained files were not organized well.

BEFORE

Users can not distinguish which files have been sent

Added category tab to help users to manage their recording files.

AFTER

Users could find different state files through the tab

Recording File Page - bottom sheet

Most users were confused about how the small bottom tag changes and what the tag represents. I changed the tag after multiple explorations to have a more intuitive presentation.

BEFORE

EXPLORATIONS

AFTER

Used the actual button rectangle shape to increase the intuitive.
Separated the information into a bottom sheet and added title for the tag.
At the early stages of design, I aimed to pursue a simple interface for our users. However, simple designs do not mean intuitive. The simple design caused confusion for the users when they tried to edit the recording. Users noticed the changes on the small tag but they did not know what caused the changes. This feedback showed that the small tag was not helpful to the users.  Therefore, I revised the design and put the information into a separate bottom sheet and created a categorized tag (Assigned) to help users to better classify recording files.

Recording Process - Button Assign Step

Based on the user feedback, I changed the way I presented the button option so it was more intuitive and provided more guidance on what the page states.

BEFORE

Instead of showing the color of different buttons, I showed the buttons on the actual device which improve the intuitivenness of the process.

AFTER

Low Intuitive without Physcial Mapping

High intuitive with physical mapping

Final Prototype

03

WHAT I LEARNED

1.Cross Functional Collaboration

In this project, I have experienced how essential close cooperation between multiple parties. Especially, when conducting user needs assessments and finalizing a design direction, I consulted with both stakeholders and app engineers to create the best design possible. By including engineers in the design process, I was able to establish an Impact & Effort Matrix that allowed me to lay a good foundation for the subsequent designs.

2.Repeated Iteration

While working through the brainstorm, I added any ideas, regardless of their quality to the map. I then ended up using all the existing data and insights to create the current Linkie design. As I incorporated these aspects and feedback from usability tests, I was able to constantly re-evaluate the decisions I made as I progressed. Through constant iteration, the fundamental problem, Linkie was hoping to solve, was solved. I will continue to collaborate and work through iterations in my design future.

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@2021 Designed & Coded by Vincent Zhang