Peaches, a baby's life journal

Design research, early concept and prototype of a children’s health app that encourages new parents to document their child’s life and development, and access scientific parenting resources.

Role:

Needfinding, user research, user interface and user experience testing, final concept mocks, video production and editing

Year:

2016

Tags:

#newborn, #health, #baby, #journal

Peaches

Peaches is a mobile app concept that pairs a visual delightful personal journal with health and development milestone-tracking, and actionable scientific insights on how to encourage your child’s development.

Features

Capture, Create, Share

Capture moments (photo, video or audio) and tag. Add to baby's journey map. Use library of content enrichment tools, from photo enhancements to challenges etc to visualize the journey. Share out to selected friends and family via WeChat.

Achieve

Track developmental and personal milestones and receive pediatric guidance on best practices for encouraging your child’s development.

Video

Problem

First-time parenting experiences are fraught with uncertainty and stress. In China, where there's a lack of established trusted parenting practices, and a generational rejection of traditional ways, new parents go elsewhere to find the answers, guidance and support they need.

Our team of designers and engineers from Stanford U, Peking U. and Tsinghua U. wanted to know if there was a way to leverage technology to improve the first-time parenting experience and assist parents in improving early developmental outcomes for their children.

DISCOVERY

We're pregnant!

What would you do if you found out you were expecting today? What is your experience with parenting? In a very early-on mindshare exercise our, team tried to personally answer these questions.

But, no one in the team had had 1st-hand or even 2nd hand experiences or knowledge of having and raising kids. No one had cousins or siblings with kids either from which to draw initial intuitions about the experiences of first-time parents.


Elephant in the room
The current generation of Chinese moms and dads to be are all single-children. Without older siblings to look toward as parenting models it's no wonder none of us had any idea where to begin!

DISCOVERY

Intuition-building

In order to quickly build some starting intuitions to take with us into our user interviews, we scoped out the domains we had the most questions in as a team, then deep-dove into the literature, conducting domain research via Google, academic research articles, online publications, apps and services:

Parenting Knowledge

How are parents accessing knowledge about keeping children healthy and on track for development?

What kind of knowledge is trusted and why?

Beyond Are there any existing pain points about the current way of finding information about parenting practices?

What we learned:

Sources of parenting knowledge in China:

1 The Web
2 Advice from family and friends
3 Books

Parents trust advice of experts or scientists over that of parents or friends.

We learned that after giving birth, many mothers switch over to mobile-based tools/apps*

Record-keeping

What kinds of health records do Chinese parents keep as their children age and progress developmentally?

Why do they choose to keep certain records over others?

How is this information kept, stored, accessed?

Beyond. As a team, we talked about the different kinds of “documentation” we do as a spectrum. From the formal height, weight, vaccinations, to the informal, video clips from daily life, photos, audio recordings.

What we learned:

From an initial search, we weren’t able to find out nearly as much about specific behaviors of parents in terms of record-keeping.

BabyTree, the largest parenting website in China contains forums, advice blogs, shopping guides and other content aimed at mothers and those planning to conceive.

We found templates for tracking formal health milestones in analog format and digital baby album templates.

DISCOVERY

In the field

Equipped with a set of questions and some initial intuitions about the experiences of first-time parents in Beijing, we went out to conduct exploratory interviews with users.

We interviewed 6 young parents between ages 20-40, two fathers and 4 mothers. All were first time parents and had children between 5-mo (newborn) and 6 years old (starting kindergarten). 2 of our interviewees were from second-tier cities visiting Beijing with their families, and the others were residents of Beijing. 4-6 of our parents had college education. Interviews were either sit-down (arranged) or man-on-the-street style interviews.


On the interview process
Man on the street style interviews have upsides and some serious drawbacks. Upside: Mothers we interviewed in the field were with their children in a naturalistic way - playing or walking alongside, giving us great context for observation. Drawback: Not having the full attention of our parents walking on the street. Unlike in the US cultures, it's not common at all for a person to be stopped on the street and asked for their opinion in China. This made some of our "asks" uncomfortable.

A working dad tells us about his experiences with his newborn son!

SYNTHESIS

Insights from interviews

We sat down and compared our notes from our interviews, synthesizing our findings into a few broad learnings to take with us into the next phase of design work.

Parents concerned about development

Parents we talked to were worried about their children falling behind developmentally (5/6). They felt like they had access to information about parenting and best practices that they trust, but having that access didn't necessarily translate to confidence around parenting and buying decisions during their child's early years. Big concerns for them were physical development (3/6), meeting learning milestones at school (4/6).

What they said:

"My biggest worry right now is whether he does well in school"

“I’d want to know what kinds of things I can do to encourage her development.”

“I mostly try to buy European-brand toys and dietary supplements for my daughter, just to be safe. But it's always hard to know.”

Missing memories

Our first-timers were eager to show us the photos and cherised moments of their childrent’s lives. We learned that organizing the photos, mementos and keepsakes was itself a hassle. Parents wished they could have a more complete record of their child’s development.

What they said:

I keep so many photos, I must have 1 terabytes worth of photos...”

“It’s a real pity that I don’t have a recording of the sound of my daughter’s voice from when she was a baby. She’s already 4 now...”

Man showing a photo of his baby Woman showing app on phone

Our plugged in parents showing us photos and apps they use!

SYNTHESIS

Problem

We started our design work by asking parents how they document their child’s health and what specific concerns they had around health and development. We ended up learning more about informal documentation - memory-making and the gap between intention and action that almost all our parents referenced. We used these findings to craft some guiding questions.

Parents were keen on keeping cherished moments of childhood and development in the form of photos, video, and audio. But producing artefacts and keeping a meaningful chronicle was a time-intensive and challenging task.

How might we enrich and simplify the memory-making experience for new parents?

We learned that parents have access to the whole web for parenting questions and best practices, having that access didn't translate to confidence around their child's progression in the early years or their own decisionmaking.

How might we support parents to narrow the gap between intention and action around their child's early development etc.?

Concept

Could the informal record of a child’s life (those photos, videos and cherished moments) be combined with a system aimed at closing gap between intention and action for busy working parents? We envisioned a mobile app that parents could use to create a simple, highly visual living document that chronicled their child's progression, paired with a way to log health and development outcomes through the form of milestones. With that concept in mind, we started prototyping.

LO-FI PROTOTYPE

Baby's life journal + milestone tracker

For our first prototype we wanted to test 2 core areas: the journal feature which would help parents collect photo, video, and audio from their daily lives and the developmental milestones log. We explained that the system would prompt users to add milestones such as (sleeping through the night, first words, walking as they happened)

Journal

Capture a moment

Select images to add

Select images to add

Add to timeline/chronicle

Turn photos, videos, audio into remixes, montages, albums and art to share

share out via social media / WeChat

Milestone tracker

Milestone journey tracking in different domains of development

LO-FI PROTOTYPE

Testing

We tested our paper concept app prototype with 5 female participants working at the Stanford Asian Liver Center. In a team of three we had a user tester sit with the participant, lightly introduce the app's general function and guide the participant through the experience.

Life journal

Our parents were excited about the creation and documentation portion of the experience, but most felt the most useful part to be the organization/documentation aspect, not necessarily transformation of the content into shareable videos.

What they said:

"I would use this feature" 4/5

"This is exactly what I need."

“The most useful part to me is the organization/documentation of images and content part.” 3/5

“Why just kids and children? Couldn’t other people use this?” 1/5

“I would want to be able to export everything I made with my baby” 2/5

“I would pay for this depending on the quality of the creation content” 1/5

"I’m concerned about privacy. Can I have the option to share with just friends not the world?"" 1/5

Milestone tracker

Our parents liked the idea of tracking developmental milestones and guides, but wanted actionable insights and tips on how to reach those milestones (like enrichment advice or shopping suggestions).

What they said:

I like the achievement + milestones part, can you make it more useful to me by giving me tips on how to reach those milestones with my baby? 3 /5

“I’d find this more useful if it gave me shopping suggestions for the baby” 1/5

“What would I do with just the the achievement data?” 1/5

MED-FI PROTOTYPE

Iteration

It seemed like we were heading in the right direction with our apps' two core functions. For our next iteration, we wanted to further develop the achievement experience, using actionable insights and prompts for users. To do that, we drew on adolescent developmental psychology for examples of content.

Users can access a milestone log showing key developmental milestones their child has reached and the date of that milestone.

Milestones connect to developmental guidance: for example early language development.

A parent might document their child’s first words by completing the milestone

Or reference the scientific guidance on early language acquisiition recommended by experts in child language development at Stanford U.

System map showing connected parts of prototype.

Going Further

We wrapped up our work with a presentation to Beijing-based entrepreneurs, designers, and affiliates of Tsinghua, Peking and Stanford Universities Global Challenges and Human Computer Interaction programs. Jackie Yang, our intrepied team mate and developer furthered our work by building a looks like version of the app in XCode which we demo-ed there. Going further, our team would have taken this working prototype into a second round of testing and iteration to get more granular insights into user interaction with our features and core concept.

During our process, we limited ourselves to one data input source: the phone. But why should a living diary be limited to the kinds of data a phone can capture? Might a better data collection interface be a baby monitor, a bottle, baby shoes? Wouldn’t that change over time? It’s a problem that necessitates a solution in IoT and connected devices. .

With other sources of data, we might be able to deliver personalized and nuanced insights with artificial intelligence.