The Pop-Ins App
A personal-network babysitter app.
As the famed umbrella toting nanny who floated in on the winds from the east once said… “There’s nowhere to go but up”. Our team took that motto and ran with it. Do we need another babysitting app? There are dozens of them in the apple app store alone. Well, we think you need this one.
Four people from different walks of like from different parts of the US joined together for one purpose, to solve a problem. In the preliminary stages of our project with General Assembly, we were given a task. We were to “identify an opportunity within a problem space and select an appropriate platform for which to design a solution.” Simple enough, right? Not so fast mate…. We have four diverse people attempting to identify a problem and to solve that problem successfully. Oh, and not only that we have to present our findings to people we’ve never met before in a mock stakeholder meeting. *gulp*. Well our team, once assembled, got to work tout-suite. This was our first time working together and we quickly became acquainted with one another and got to work.
The Problem Space
The first order of business was to find a problem space and find a way to solve that problem. We brainstormed, mind mapped, and DOT voted and we ended up with the problem of how can we help our user to find a caregiver for their children in a tight timeframe from a trusted source. We agreed on this being the problem that we would solve for and got to work. We needed to submit a “Project Proposal” which was green-lit, and then we were off to the races!
We developed a screener survey and asked questions like, do you have children? This was the most crucial question we asked mainly because initially, we wanted to learn more about how parents look to find emotional connections & support through the community. We also wanted to know what device do they mainly use to access the internet, as well as do they have parenting support networks available to them? We also asked what resources do they use for interacting with other parents? These questions were key in finding parents to interview to further delve into issues they need help resolving.
After we received the data from the surveys we found five candidates that we could interview. Each person we interviewed gave us valuable insights as to potential problems that were in common. There were some trends we started to pick up on.
“You learn who your support system is in both good times and bad.” — a dad we interviewed
“[I didn’t really think about myself for the first 2 months]…There was a week where I didn’t shower at all.” — a mother we interviewed
For the process of synthesizing the information that we collected, we chose to use affinity mapping as we sifted through the sea of data. And here is what insights that emerged through the research synthesis that we chose to focus on.
- “I am stressed, because of circumstances beyond my control”
- “I rely on friends & online resources for help with parenting”
- “I value privacy for both myself & my family”
- “I am continually faced with new challenges”
After we synthesized the information from our interviews, we developed a persona who would embody the needs, behaviors, goals & pain points of our users. I’d like you to meet Joy!
As you can see, Joy is a mother who loves her children and she’s well, full of Joy. When it comes to her parenting she puts her kid’s needs above her own. This can cause A LOT of stress in her life and her marriage. Since she needs time to herself and time with her spouse she needs to be able to find a reliable caregiver for her two boys. Sometimes this need comes in an emergency and sometimes it is planned out in advance. Either way, it is comforting to know that there are caregivers at the ready to help in her situation.
The following is an excerpt from our presentation notes, Credit Heather Sterman (team member)
Now that you’ve met Joy, I’m going to walk you through the journey of something that happened to her this past weekend when she & her spouse were planning to attend a wedding out of town. They brought their kids & had arranged to have a sitter watch them in the hotel room while they attended the wedding. So let’s dive in…
Joy begins her day with coffee & is excited for the wedding of her close friend. Her mood greatly improves after she’s had her coffee, and takes her kids to the park. Suddenly, while she’s getting ready for the wedding, the sitter texts Joy to let her know that they have a cold and aren’t going to be able to watch the kids. Joy’s mood immediately plummets from this sudden change in plans, and she scrambles to text her friends to see if anyone is available to help. It’s getting close to when she and her spouse have to leave, and they still haven’t found anyone. So, with no Mary Poppins coming with her umbrella to save the day, Joy’s spouse begrudgingly offers to stay behind with the kids while she attends the wedding by herself. So Joy goes to the wedding alone, and while she has a good time she feels awkward without her spouse by her side. Poor Joy.
So let’s examine Joy’s moods throughout the day — she begins on a neutral-to-positive note, but quickly takes a dive when her sitter cancels, causing an abrupt change in plans. This affects her mood for the rest of the day, and while she begins to perk up a little at the wedding, the end result could have been better had her spouse been able to attend with her. From here, we have found opportunities for Joy to quickly reach out to friends and ask for help, so she can find a trusted caregiver as soon as possible.
Our Persona
Through our research, we found that parents often experience stress from circumstances that are beyond their control.
Joy can generally find a sitter for her kids with advanced notice, but when unexpected events or emergencies happen, she is often at a loss for where to find “on-demand” help watching her kids.
How might we help Joy find someone from a trusted source to watch her kids at a moment’s notice?
We started by doing some competitive research and found an opportunity for parents to use their networks to address their childcare needs. We discovered that the bulk of the babysitting and caregiver apps in the market are mainly “agency centric” or also specialize in multiple general care areas as well as children. For example, Task Rabbit focuses on helping with tasks or chores you may need doing inside and outside the house. We decided that our focus was to be in the personal network and childcare only.
With that in mind, this is where we came up with the idea of Pop-Ins. The key inspiration for the name is Mary Poppins as she is a nanny who mysteriously floats in and takes care of the Banks’ kids and does a smashing job at that. The idea here is that your “nanny” will pop-in to help you with your need for childcare.
We quickly came up with a plan to help the user be able to quickly, send out a request to their network, for a babysitter that is trusted and reliable. As far as our choice of platform, we’ll design a native app for the iPhone and the iOS system, initially.
We chose this over a responsive platform because our users are parents who are constantly on the go — and need easy accessibility and convenience.
- Their information is saved in the app
- They’ll be able to make use of location services
- They can easily text and make gun calls
- And they won’t have to sign in every time they use it
Now that we defined the problem we wanted to solve for Joy, and had an idea of what features would be needed to solve it, we decided to conduct a design studio to quickly generate some visual solutions.
We started with the assumption that Joy was already a user of our product and had entered a profile about her and her kids. And after a round of designing, pitching, iterating, and combining our designs into one — we had a paper prototype we were ready to test…
We made sure that our prototype took into account the urgency of Joy’s need.
And wanted to make sure we had features — like pre-populated fields with information about who her kids were and if they had any specific needs or requirements. We also took advantage of the iPhone’s location services so that Joy could quickly show where she is to find nearby help. After sending out a request for help, Joy could see who in her network was available nearby
And if she clicked on one of their profiles — she could see exactly how she was connected to each person. She would only be shown people to whom she had a 1st, 2nd or 3rd level connection. Now, armed with our paper prototype, we set out to do some usability testing on our target audience: Parents
After some usability testing, we discovered that we needed to tweak the layout, wording, and features of the app. We iterated and made the changes necessary to make the app more efficient. Our biggest takeaway was that the need for safety and security was of paramount importance to our users. Users rely on ratings of caregivers and the cost/fee each one charges in order to determine who to select.
The stakeholder meeting we had was successful. We presented our research and findings. We displayed our idea as to how best to solve the problem for our user, Joy. and showed how we made changes along the way to make the product something that would not only be useful for Joy but for whoever uses it. All in all the process was a long one but we got there in the end and created a product that was clean, clear, and concise.
