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Kids always want their parents to be around as they are the most comfortable with them. They enjoy their parents being around to listen to their non-stop chatter, answering all their questions and play their world games - But sadly, parents can’t always be with them.
Our project curiously investigates how we can help families nurture this bond and help them make some more enjoyable memories with using our product – Kidzie.
UX Designer
Fall 2018 (~5 weeks)
Affinity diagram, Prototyping, Usability testing
Sketch, Photoshop, Balsamiq, Marvel
Parents these days are continuously juggling between full-time jobs, household chores, and helping their kids with schoolwork. In the midst of all of these parents giving kids quality time becomes difficult. Also, from kids perspectives, these toddlers need to open their hearts and not suppress any of their fears, anxieties, mischievousness so as they could have a good mental and emotional stability in their childhood.
Kidzie is an interactive app that encourages parents to nurture and be in connect with their kids. The goal is to help them connect instantly irrespective of their work schedules.
I moved on to the design space for “Kidzie”a collaborative solution that consists of an application for the kid’s tablet, and that could entirely be controlled with a parent mobile application.
1. Kids kept asking their caretakers if they could talk to their parents or at least view their image.
2. Learning stations, which comprised of books and desktops that were more suited for kids where the keyboards had color-coded buttons on it.
The focus group, was conducted in the Greenwood Library to understand how parents managed the situation currently.
1. Parents believed in limited exposure to technology.
2. Three out of three parents believed and promoted the use of technology as a reward for task completion and good behavior.
With information from the observation and focus group sessions, we then conducted semi structured interviews to understand how was the current bond between parents and kids with the below questions:
1. How do parents and children spend time together?
2. How do parents manage to keep up with the child’s daily activity?
3. How do they communicate when they are away from their child?
4. Who do parents trust in case of emergencies for their child's well-being?
1. Most of the parents said to trust their kids to be taken care only by known people.
2. 83% of parents said they would like to spend more time with kids, but their day jobs made that problematic.
3. Parents worked for 8+ hours in the day.
This project was about understanding the equation between parents and kids. It was a great experience in learning how to meet the needs of the equation, keeping in mind the concerns of the parents at the same time.
On the other hand, designing for kids was another challenge in itself; considering the age group of the kids, it was challenging to design the product from the kid's perspective.
It is something we still need to explore as a team and interacting with kids and doing some usability testing with them would help us gain some more insights for the product as a whole.