Ux Design Case Study
Feeding disability in Children and Infants
Empowering struggling parents and building communities through technology
The problem: Parents distress when children’s do not eat and it is a shame in accepting. People who had this experience can normalize the situation.
Client Brief: UX/UX - feeding disability application
Year: 2021
Tools : Photoshop, Indesign, Illustrator, Marvel, Sketch, Adobe XD.
One person design team
What is Feeding Children’s?
It is a web application to support parents who are struggling with feeding disability with their children or infant, helping them to get quick and reliable support from experienced parents.
Research
Research strategy focused on:
Contextual Inquiry: Understanding the context
Competitors: Understanding the competitor market
Users: understanding users motivations, needs, and frustrations.
Contextual Enquiry
Observing: Observed a group of mums meeting every Wednesday in the community hall.
Inquiring: Mum's conversations and questions are around feeding difficulties and struggle with their children. They search for advice and help from other mothers.
Documenting: Gathering and documenting information throw surveys.
Competitive Analysis
Market research:
Online research of similar applications. On the market research, there is existing in the market a variety of children and infant applications. Some of the app found on the market and top are the following:
Child medical history app, Baby bundie app, Sit or squat,Grow app, Cloud baby Monitor, High contrast and pattern shapes, Hoop, what to spect, Mum maps.
The apps provided help for parents with general information on children's development some specialized in social events and others applications are specially designed to resolve recurring issues like sleeping, feeding patterns, and recording.
Application in the market:
It is a big variety of toddlers and children applications however I could not find on the market research a similar that resolve the feeding issues.
Produced a comparison chart with the most similar applications and the most liked parent applications in the market :
Compared apps
Conclusion: Few competitors offered an ‘expert advice’ element as part of their current customer offering
most competitors were not focused in support local parents and community,
most competitors do not have a location map, chat, parents advice, parents meet-ups, or chats.
Going depth on Research:
Going further with the gathered information. Produced depth research on children’s and found other new applications specialised in parent support.
The biggest sample was an application that helps children’s with ADHD disorders.
It is a successful study case. The app gives daily tips to parents but also give a personal
appointment with paediatricians and specialist and it has an online
team to support parents. In the case of our application,the support will come from experienced mums and specialist people to help for free.
Speech Therapist
Feeding consultants, Paediatricians.
Other samples below:
Winie app: Help parents with childcare but also it supports them with different parents topics and advice
Parenting app is information to parents about how to manage behaviours developing parental skills
Childcare finder app is made especially for parents to manage fears about new events in life-giving them parental tips for example how to handle going back to the office.
Understanding the users:
After competitor research in hand, the focus is turned to users.
Screener survey:
To distinguish participants for the user interviews it began with a screener survey distributed on email to local parents and we received 18 responses. The survey was made using the monkey survey service.
90% Likes to get access to advise from experienced parents
98% Interested in using an app to local support in the feeding subject in their community
90% Search for apps with advice in parenting issues
User Interviews
After screening users, conducted 3 user interviews each lasting 20–30 minutes with our key user groups with local mums that had a severe need of feeding support, to get a feel for their needs and attitude.
The topics explored in interviews were:
Needs of reliable advice
Poor support
devices used
Previous and current experiences
‘I always feel positive with my baby issues when I can ask for support in a group’.
‘I am a new parent; I don’t know where to find reliable advice’.
Affinity Mapping
After completing the interviews. Wrote down all of the insights on post-it notes. I began to cluster them based on themes, relationships, and patterns to create an affinity map..
Insights:
Parents are frustrated with no reliable information about children’s and toddlers with feeding difficulties.
Parents reported that not any app gives reliable feeding support, they have to go to Facebook groups with a parent to ask.
Users were comfortable with using technology to get reliable information from experienced parents.
Users preferred small groups or one-to-one chat with an experienced parent with similar histories people who can relate to the same problems.
Users prefer to find local and community support.
There is a struggle in the parenting feeding subject and poor government support.
Personas
Lily, is a real mum who had a baby with feeding difficulties, also she finds challenging her 3 years old. She wants to speak to mums, share experiences and also help other mums. She is a real representation of the typical user and a combination of the research findings.
Lily is 33, she is a pharmacist, and works part-time in London. She has 2 toddlers. Even though she had experience with her first baby, she struggled a lot when her young boy experience feeding difficulties since born.
Empathy Map:
To understand more about Lily, I created an empathy map. This maps out Lily’s thoughts and emotions when trying to get support.
This helped us understand where I could focus my work to reflect her needs. A key message here is that Lily wants to resolve her children's issues as she worries constantly, she can not sleep well. She struggles to find support as she is a busy mum and also it is difficult for her to meet mums as she is busy with the kids.
Lily pain points are:
Finding support.
Not having a social platform to keep in touch with local Experienced parents for support.
Experience Map:
Lilys’ emotions are mapped out in her current journey, including each task involved. We found that during Lily’s journey to reach her goal she went through a mix of emotions which ultimately ended in her feeling of needed always help and support.
Defining the Problem:
To summarise Lily’s pain points,
developed a problem statement, a clear description of the issue incorporating a vision and methods to solve the problem:
Lilys needs a way to find affordable and experience quality information. She struggles to listen, and she needs experienced mums with similar issues in the community.
Followed this up with some “ How Might help” statements as actionable positive questions to launch the upcoming ideation:
How might help :
Give Lily the sense of support when she searches for information in the application?
Help her to find similar mums with the same problems in the community or near, in extend country.
Reassure Lily that the information supplied is back up by experts and NHS. The information is going to be from trusted resources.
Defining the Solution:
Creation of the Children issues feeding application.
Find nearby close mums with similar experiences.
Finding experienced mums in the community and country with experience, that wants to help other mums and will like to share their experience, help to get the best advice with other people interested in similar activities and arrange chats, meet up real-time communication between users. Design a positive and helpful application with clear instructions and be supported by the government.
Feature Prioritisation
Produced a list of features.
The features
were
mapped in
a quadrant against
essential / nice
to have and
high / low effort
. Classified
on
producing six features
in the top and two quadrants.
Paper Prototype & Wireflow
Paper Prototype & Wireflow User testing of the paper prototype analysis:
Sketched a paper prototype and tested with 5 users, with a scenario to search support.
Task 1: Search how you can find support find experienced parents locally. Get tips and information
Task 2: Search how you can find chats.
During the processes of prototyping and moving from the information architecture map to the app. There it is an extensive information in the children feeding subjects. To communicate the reliable advice parent need, it needs a web site on the side for further development.
The application can specify the main subjects and urgent queries, also sign in and chat. One of the app objectives it is to maintain a friendly and happy environment with the content. Parents need support, the features will give positive messages, and tips. It is important in the app the ability to connect with experienced parents and get local support. The map and groups are the best outcome of the support.
Style Guides
After research and user feedback.
Created
design concept with a simple style guide
in order to move forward with the
low and high-fidelity screens making use of
soft palate colours throughout the designs.
The inspiration to the application mood board
conveyed the feelings of positivity feeding,
friendship,
children and parents.
Font and Iconography
Logo and Palette
Low-mid Fidelity Prototype
On completing user tests with our paper
prototype. It is compared the low-mid.
fidelity screens
against the user flow
to ensure it matched
the actions the
user would take, and would
use this as a template when designing our
mid fidelity prototypes.
From mid fidelity to hi fidelity prototypes:
Tested the prototypes with 4 users.
Comments:
Prefer to have a sign-in part when required as sometimes parents are busy and would love to see the app first, then content and sign in.
It is a friendly app, to try to remove alert notifications unless the user wants to activate this feature.
Very important to add appointments that allow being added to their calendar.
Final Design
With our final app design for Feeding Childrens, parents can book one-to-one chats, get advice, and consult the best information supplied by parents. Also share similar problems and questions with the community.
Included wireframe dedicated to Inclusivity. Users can advise and let know the application about users with a disability, colour blindness, or other impairment issues.
Next Steps
Additional options we would have liked to explore:
Continue testing.
Look into developing the community page.
Keep developing more pages.