Oven Bun
Best education resource for first-time parents
My Team
Project Overview
Project Info
UX Design, EdTech
Feb.2020 - Apr.2020 (~1.5 month)
Oven Bun is a mobile app that provides education resources and support to first-time parents to help them better prepared mentally, physically, and financially throughout the pregnancy journey.
It enables first-time parents to:
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Understand the health and well-being of the first-time mother
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Process and be comfortable with pregnancy preparation for first-time parents
Overall Process
The Problem
The transition from a couple to parents is challenging and somewhat intimidating since it involves social, psychological, physiological and financial adjustment. Studies have shown that up to 20% of women suffer from mood or anxiety disorders during pregnancy. Although numerous resources for first-time parents are already available online, it is difficult to identify the authenticity and select relevant ones that suit individual situations.
How might we help first-time parents better prepare during pregnancy state and for their newborn?
We came up with this topic because we have friends who were pregnant and had been having some challenges during the process. However, none of us have the experience of being a mom or designing an edTech platform, which surprisingly require a different knowledge base and a somewhat different design process. So in a nutshell,
We had no idea what to expect! 🤯
Well, if that's the case, let's start with some research first and try to understand the problem better.
01 Discover
Since being a parent is a life-long process, we didn't want to dream too big. So we started off our research by narrowing down the scope - which timeframe should we focus on supporting? As parents started to plan out birth? When mommies find out they're pregnant? Do we want to support post labor? After discussing within the team, we decided to focus our problems on pre-labor preparations, because that's when first-time parents feel most lost and need more guidance.
What do potential users say?
User Research
In order to better understand the problem and see what challenges new mommies are facing, we talked to two pairs of new parents.
"There are already existing platforms out there and I've tried a couple, and you can read related articles online too. But there are so many resources and you just don't know which one to trust."
"I care a lot about baby's health and I've been prepping for the baby products like mattress, crib... But I have no idea what materials are harmless to babies..."
"I did not do too much right away. But my wife started researching at “what to expect” right away. In the end, she had a 100p file about the information she found and shared with me when she found something useful."
"... just being there whenever she needs me. Because there weren’t many things that I can help with. "
We also did some research online by visiting various forums to learn about the challenges new parents are facing. These research helped us better portray our learners' personas later.
So many resources already! Why should they choose us? 👀
Competitive Analysis
During interviews, a couple of existing resources/platforms came up. Our team conducted competitive analysis to learn more about the tools that parents are already using and jotted down a list of findings.
Key findings include:
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All the popular resources focus on treating moms as the main learner, while neglecting providing the education resources for their partners.
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Common resources all focus on providing health related information of both moms and babies.
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A lot of content is hard to consume since it always involves large chunks of paragraphs.
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The platforms aim at providing the knowledge/skills to parents, but whether they are able to remember/utilize the skills is not guaranteed.
There's nothing wrong with wanting to know more!
Literature Review
During our interviews and competitive analysis, we learned that oftentimes, moms are normally more involved in this process, and while their partners want to help out, they don't think there's a lot that they can do. At the beginning, we made the assumptions that "fathers' involvements are important" and "it is important to provide first-time parents groups for new parents". After reviewing literatures and papers, we validated these two assumptions which can further help us brainstorm and structure the potentials feature we would like to include in our platform.
Now that we have a better understanding of the problems, let's sum it up! 👇
02 Define
What do users want to achieve?
Learners Needs/Goals
After synthesizing the research findings, we identified some core users needs, which include:
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to acquire pregnancy-related knowledge and to have previous knowledge validated - both personas
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to find a safe and inclusive online community - primary persona
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to have a platform that would help track, budget and list items - both personas
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to find a way to support their pregnant partner - secondary persona
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to have a platform to seek professional assistance - both personas
🌟 For V1, we decided to focus on the first four needs and treat the last one (i.e. professional assistance) as a future opportunity as if this was a product that would be expanded and build partnerships with healthcare companies.
So...what do our learners look like? 🤓
Learners Personas
From our interviews, we learned that mommies are usually the active ones in the learning process, while partners are more passive despite they also want to help out. So instead of focusing on one type of learner, we decided to cover both types while having mommies be the primary persona.
What do we wanna help users learn? 📓
Learning Goals
Unlike learner's goals, which are the things users want to learn as they use our system, learning goals are the things we would like to help users achieve after they use our product.
As a result of using our product, first-time parents will be able to:
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Demonstrate how to take care of themselves or their pregnant partners by recording multimedia blogs of their experience and sharing with other community members.
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Plan budget and time for purchasing pregnancy and baby gears by creating a shopping-list covering all the necessities for newborns.
03 Ideate
Hold on... not yet... 😅
Remaining Questions & Assumptions
Now that we defined our learners and learning goals, we still have a couple of unanswered questions that need to be figured out before actually starting our design explorations:
Where do we find experienced "experts" to guide new learners?
How can we incentivize learners to learn throughout the journey?
How can we facilitate the collaborations between partners?
Since at some point, active learners (moms) would go through the entire journey, we are making the assumption that the valuable experiences they gained from our product would motivate them to give back as experienced "experts" to new learners.
During our interviews, we found out that users would really appreciate having some types of coupons for their baby packages, since it does require a lot of preparations. We plan to utilize this need as an incentive for users to learn more actively.
From our research, we learned that moms usually start learning and planning right away, while partners take longer time to realize their new role as being a dad/mom, hence taking fewer actions during the process. We would like to enable a share feature that would highlight/elaborate the piece of information before moms share to their partners, to encourage passive learners to participate more and show more support to moms.
After exploring these questions, we reached a consensus that it would be more appropriate for this product to be a mobile App, since it is more accessible and mommies can refer back to the knowledge anytime they want. Moreover, we are making the assumption that each partner would have access to a mobile phone, and having the product to be a mobile App would make the collaboration between partners more synchronous.
Let's get into design! 🥳
User Flow
Alright, it looks like we can start thinking about the features and steps that users go through in our system. We started on brainstorming other features that would be helpful to our personas and trying to map those features with learning theories as well:
Afterwards, we constructed a user flow that showcases the steps that users go through for each feature.
The party starts... now 😎
Wireframes
Based on our user flow, we started out our design explorations by creating wireframes. After receiving feedback from our professor and making sure we utilized the learning theories correctly, we finalized the features and wireframes and moved on to the high fidelity mockups.
A fun version that Figma had on April Fool's Day! 🥐
04 Deliver
Woohoo! 🎉
High-Fidelity Mockups
💡Reflections
What would I do differently? 😯
Time Machine
Since we had limited time, we received most of the feedback from our professor but not from actual users. If we had more time, we would definitely ask potential users to try out the design and iterate based on their insights. Also, even though we talked to a few users before ideation, we will definitely conduct more user research with snowball sampling to enrich our data and get more fruitful insights.
💛 What have I learned?
Takeaways
This is my first edTech project and my first group design project. Even though it wasn't a thorough process, I still have a couple of valuable takeaways:
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It's really important to establish a style guide, especially when working in group - this will keep the design of the entire product consistent.
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Designing EdTech can be a little bit different from designing other kinds of software, since learners started off as being "a piece of blank paper" and it is important to provide structure, guidance, as well as motivations for them to keep learning.