| Target User | Parents who need to find a place to hang out with kids |
| Sector | Family, Social, Entertainment |
| My Role | Entire product design, including user research, ideation, visualization and testing |
| Project Time | 2 months |
EnRoute is a mobile app concept, which is focusing on helping parents with different ages of kids find a suitable place for spending family time. The idea of this concept initially began with my own problem of finding a good place that I can go with my wife and my 5-month old baby during COVID-19. By conducting the research with more parents having different age groups kids, I found more opportunities for making such product design, especially for parents. It’s just a conceptual project so that it still has a lot of room to optimize with more testing. However, I enjoy the entire process making this design and I believe it is a great concept to be a real success.
Software
Sketch
InVision/InVision Studio
Figma
The Problem & Initial Idea
Since COVID-19 broke out, did you ever have a problem that you tried to go somewhere you were quite familiar with, however it was actually closed during the pandemic, or its business hours were changed? As a father of a 9-month-old baby, I always faced this kind of question. Is a park still open? What’re the new hours of the supermarket? Are the facilities of a mall still running?
It is hard for people to track all information, not to speak of the parents who need more information about a place because of their kids.
How might we create a mobile app to centralize the information of a place, including the changes/updates caused by COVID-19, to help parents pick a place to go in an easier and faster way?
User Research
I conducted six in-depth interviews with my family and friends who have kids of different ages, in different cities in both Canada and the United States. I’m a new father with a newborn at home so that I can somehow understand the parents who have similar age babies, but for those who have older kids at home, the communication with them helped me observe their puzzles and find the opportunities.
The conversations were mainly about how they decided a place to go out with their kids, what kind of consideration they would think of before they go out, and any problems for them finding the desired information.
Based on the conversation, I extracted four insights:
Key Insights from User Research
Key Insight #1
Parents can’t find the information they need to bring their kids to an outdoor/indoor place.
Parents need more information than others, especially for information about the children’s facilities in a place. In the meantime, as COVID-19 is ongoing, even the hours of a place might be different as usual.
Key Insight #2
Parents don’t have time to do the research.
From my interviews with 5 families which have kids at different ages, I found parents are too busy at work and parenting to do the research for a place to go.
Key Insight #3
There’s no centralized platform especially for parents to check out destination information.
None of those families I interviewed knows a tool or a platform that is specially designed for parents to find a piece of destination information.
Key Insight #4
Parents have different needs with kids of different ages.
Kids of different ages have different behaviors and needs so that their parents have different needs to a place. And the kids could usually be sorted out into four groups: newborn, toddler, preschooler, and teen.
Sort Out Criteria for the Filter
According to the user research, I collected the criteria that parents would value a place if it’s good for the family to go. I found that there is much information commonly needed, not only for parents; meanwhile, parents would need more information about the places because of their kids, and the desired information would be varied depends on kids’ ages. So I sort out those criteria into two major categories, which are commonly needed info and specifically needed info for parents.
Through further communication with differents parents, I also found that it is very common for Canadian families to have more than one kid. Different age kids have different requests and need, and for those who have more than one kid, the requests might be combined. So that I came up with an advanced category for the filter, which is Age Group. It would allow parents to simply choose the age group(s) base on their kid’s age(s) to access those recommended places info for suitable children.
Target Audience – Personas
Based on the user research and insights extracted, I came up with two personas who represent two types of core users:
Persona #1 - Kate Bock
Parent of One Kid
Kate is a mother of a 5 months old baby. Her decision of where to go has highly relied on the baby-friendly facilities in a place.
GOAL(S)
- To quickly find out if a place has a nursing room for her to feed the baby
- To make sure a place is stroller friendly
FRUSTRATION(S)
- Takes time to find the operation changes to a place because of COVID-19
- Limited options of places she knows
Persona #2 - Max Johnson
Parent of Two Different Ages Kids
Max is a father of two kids which one is a toddler and another is a teenage boy. He really enjoys hanging out with his two kids and wife to spend the family bonding time in his spare time.
GOAL(S)
- To find a place that both kids will have interest in
- To spend more quality bonding time with his kids
FRUSTRATIONS
- Don’t know if a place has any events or special attraction for both kids interests
- Sometimes lose track on the business hours changes during the pandemic
User Journey
Based on these two personas, I studied the process of how they behave and think when looking for a family-friendly destination.
Here in this user journey, I only focus on the parents who want to hang out with their kids, and then they start looking for a suitable place to go.
User Flow
With the goal of finding a suitable place to spend quality family time, the user flow indicates the major route of a user archiving the primary goal.
Sketch
Wireframe
Explore places with different sorting criteria
- Browse places on the Explore page
- Tap the preview window to access the detail page to learn more about the place
- Tap like to save the place in the Favourite tab
Find the desired destinations easier with the parent-customized filter
- “Suitability” in the filter provides the fastest way to sort out the places those suit for different ages kids
- The filter supports multiple selections to provide the precise targeting
Explore the places geographically with a map view
- EnRoute supports a Map View to explore places
- Numbers on the map indicate the quantity of the places in the area
- Tap one of the numbers to zoom in on the map to see the place previews
Learn more about a place on the detail page
- What is missing button allow the user to find out what is missing based on the preset filter criteria
- The standing-out COVID-19 Alert gives the user the updates of the selected place
User Testing
I produced a prototype for EnRoute and had two users to test it. Users are assigned to several tasks to explore the app function to align with the role of the personas. When they were fumbling the app, I observed how they tapped buttons. After they had completed all the tasks, I asked them the reason for their behavior based on my observation.
Next Step
EnRoute is an app inspired by COVID-19, I found the opportunity from the harsh time. However, this virus will eventually be overcome one day. So that I need to think about its long term goal.
Even it is mainly designed for those families who have kids, I want EnRoute to be used by more groups of people with different needs. I will continue conducting user research to a wider range of people to understand their frustrations, needs, and pain points, then to extract any opportunities to make EnRoute be accepted by more and more people to archive the long goal.