Hello My Village
The Basics
Hello My Village (name has since changed to Abule) is a startup that aims to mitigate many challenges new parents face when raising a child by leveraging the time and support of the surrounding community. While aspiring to provide a myriad of services to parents in need, the service offering the company is most focused on is providing pick up/drop off services for children.
Project Goal: Design a mobile-optimized community web platform to help parents find, match, and schedule caregiving and transportation services for their children.
My Role: Lead UX researcher, contributing UI designer, presenter
Project Duration: 2.5 weeks; January - February 2020
Other Team Members: 2 other General Assembly UXDI students
Tools Used: Figma, Miro, Adobe Illustrator
Market Research
Market research on similar competitors indicated that ensuring trust and child safety is one of, if not the most important, factor in securing success of the business. All the companies I looked at highlighted the safety measures the platform features to ease parental fears and facilitate trust in the system, with varying levels of success (per Yelp reviews). We learned that earning the user's trust would be paramount to the Tribe's success and could spell failure if not done correctly.
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Thus, when building out the design of our prototype, we looked to successful companies like Couchsurfing and Rover, both of which rely on trust as the underpinning of their business models, to see what strategies instill trust and reassurance for users.
User Interviews
We isolated our user base into two groups: working parents who would be more likely to request rides, and stay-at-home parents, who would be more likely to provide ride services. We conducted 14 interviews: 7 interviewees were stay-at-home parents and 5 interviewees were working parents.
Working Parent Research Goals:
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Assess willingness to use this product
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Evaluate childcare affordability
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Discover who they entrust to watch their kids
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Stay-at-Home Parent Research Goals:
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Find out how likely stay at home parents would be to provide driving/sitter services
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Assess how these parents build trust
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Findings:
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Finding a driver or sitter is time consuming and frustrating, sometimes taking up to 2 or 3 hours
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Majority of parents only entrust family and friends to watch/drive their children
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Parents were more interested in exchanging services rather than money
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Possible interest in leading activities if a program structure, and space exists
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As a platform that strives to connect working and stay-at-home parents to facilitate childcare services, the Tribe's business model relies on stay-at-home parents providing the transportation and sitting services.
My colleagues and I were surprised to find out that of the 7 stay-at-home parents interviewed, only 1 reported willingness to drive/babysit another person's child in exchange for monetary compensation. We decided to validate this finding through a survey to see if the business would have to tweak its business model.
Survey
Due to some of the surprising findings that arose from our user interviews, we disseminated a survey, culminating in 43 responses. 58% of respondents were full-time working parents and 42% were stay-at-home or part-time working parents (defined as working less than 32 hours per week).
Have you ever had someone you didn't personally know babysit your kid(s)?
Would you ever be willing to watch or pick up other people's children if you could earn money from it?
Would you ever let a vetted babysitter/driver that you didn't know personally, babysit or pick up your kids?
Would you be willing to babysit your friends' kids in exchange for them watching your kids in the future?
Research Findings
Initially, my colleagues and I thought we would be designing a sort of "Uber meets childcare" platform, but soon realized that a platform allowing strangers to pick up children could turn into something straight of a horror movie. Through our user research, we came to understand that the most promising use case is facilitating scheduling services for users and their existing network primarily through non-monetary means.
Research Finding
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The vast majority of parents are uncomfortable with the idea of having someone they do not personally know assume responsibility for their child(ren).
Design Feature​
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Primary use case is enhancing coordination between existing networks. Secondary use case is searching for caregivers outside of network.
Research Finding
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Parents are much more willing to offer childcare services rather than money in exchange for sitting/driving services.
Design Feature​
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Focus on building out non-monetary means of compensation for members.
Design Artifacts
Prototyping & Usability Testing
Testing Stats:
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2 Rounds
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13 usability testers total
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Main Takeaways:
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Clarify purpose of the website
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Add wayfinding tools
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Expand on posting to user's internal network versus platform-wide network
Final Prototype
Next Steps
Given the time-sensitive nature of this project, my colleagues and I did not have the time to fully flesh out the entirety of the platform's design. However, given more time, we would have liked to focus on further building out the following areas:
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Implement additional security measures for users
Because The Tribe's success is so heavily reliant on trust from its user base, it must prioritize adding security measures like a verification/background check process for caregivers, in addition to allowing video bios to reassure parents who might need to reach out to someone outside of their network.
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Expand payment user flow
We also did not have time to think about how a monetary and non-monetary payment system would work; in lieu of money, we suggest a quasi point-based system wherein members would accrue points for providing a service and be able to 'cash in' those points for a similar service in the future.
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Add additional ways to personalize profile
Similar to Rover's Carecard, we recommend a tag associated with each child's profile indicating any allergies or extreme likes/dislikes so that caregivers, especially those who may not be familiar with the child, is aware of medically-pertinent information or behavioral tendencies.
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