Project: Design a new application to facilitate family meet ups in the community.
Parents have a difficult time making friends, specifically with other parents, and timing family outings with other families. They also want their kids to make friends safely.
Parent Palz fosters connections over shared parenthood experiences, building a supportive community that nurtures friendships between both parents and children in a safe way.
After several iterations of the sign-up process for Parent Palz, 95% of users reported the parent varification process and child safety features presented during sign up makes them feel safe.
We conducted 9 interviews of parents with toddler-aged children. We had an equal number of moms and dads (this group included mostly two-parent households and we had one single-parent household). This left us with 200 interview notes that we sorted into 15 categories in our Affinity diagram. We also added data from 25 parent surveys. With this, we were able to create a robust empathy map as we got to know who our user persona was. We found 4 major takeaways from our research:
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We looked at four well known social apps including:Bumble, Meet Up, Facebook and Linked In. Each of these apps have a differentfocus – from connecting about work, to finding a partner or friend, to findingmeet up groups. We wanted to compare several features across these apps, likeon-boarding, to better see how our application could fit into the landscape. We would ultimitely pull from linked in and bumbles on boarding process to help create our app.
We created Holly Davis: a single mom of a 6 year old, working full time as a customer support specialist. We decided our user persona would be a single mom because we believed she would bear most pain points of a 2 parent home, AND she gives us additional pain points captured primarily by single parents - inspiring us to explore more opportunities in our app.
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Parent Palz is a localized social app that aims to help parents meet up with other like-minded parents who have children of similar ages and interests, and build meaningful friendships.
We have observed that many parents face challenges and barriers in finding and connecting with local, like-minded parents who have kids of similar ages and interests in a safe and convenient way.
How might we design an app that enables parents to communicate easily, discover opportunities, and arrange family meet-ups with other parents who share their interests and values, all while keeping safety as a priority?
Holly, a single mother of a 6-year-old girl, who works full-time, wants to find other parents with children of similar age and interests who live nearby, so that she and her child can have more opportunities to build meaningful relationships in a safe and convenient way.
We believe fostering connections over shared parenthood experiences for fellow moms and dads will achieve a supportive community that nurtures both children and friendships.
Parent Palz is developing a social meet up app for parents to meet up with other like-minded parents who have children of similar ages and interests.
We’re better because we are the only social meet up app designed just for parents with verified parent profiles, event boards just for parent & family meet-ups, in-app messaging (single and group), and the ability to import contacts and connections from other social media apps like LinkedIn.
We’re believable because we will offer safe, convient and targetted social media app, that can work in tandum with the biggest social media apps (LinkIn and Facebook) to build trust.
During our feature prioritization and after comparing competitors, our big decision came down to whether to focus on matching with other parents similar to Bumble BFF or finding local events similar to Meet Up. To answer this question we referred back to our user interviews and decided to prioritize features like finding events and groups that are filtered towards the users interests & finding kid-friendly locations, and sharing locations with friends, for example letting them know you’re going to the park. Also being able to see who is attending those events and viewing their profile beforehand to know if there are like-minded parents attending. Lastly still being able to friend other parents to help foster new friendships and in-app messaging so users can maintain privacy.
We kicked off UI brainstorming by creating mood boards for how the app could manifest itself visually. Since our target user is parents, we liked the elements of nostalgia but still geared it towards adults. To help us organize our style options, our graphic organizer developed 6 different sets which we all added to and used to help guide our ultimate style.
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Each of the four designers on our team workedon sketches independently. We then reviewed our sketches together and combinedaspects from each design that we liked into a low-fidelity prototype.
For our UI style, we Utilized bold but approachable fonts. We developed a bright color palette that primarily features blues for feelings of security, with some bright accent colors. We incorporated rounded buttons and doodle-style illustrations that play into the fun nostalgic feeling.
We meticulously assessed our font colors to prioritize accessibility. Achieving a contrast of 15.61 for Black on Green background and 8.39 for Black on Blue background, we ensured robust readability for both large and small text sizes. Our text, though exuding playfulness, maintains clear legibility. Moreover, our decision to employ a paper-cut design for menus underwent extensive user testing, specifically evaluating functionality and ease of use on handheld devices, accommodating both left and right-handed users.
We developed low to mid to high fidelity prototypes, as we both refined our "wave" style and brand, and conducted user testing of both UI and on-bording process along the way.
We conducted user testing throughout, and a main focus was how to get parents to describe their parenting approach when building their profile: We conducted AB testing with different copy options. We decided to go with option B-parenting values because it received more positive feedback than option A-parenting styles.
We also received very positive feedback on the verification step which would run a background check through a sex offender database, users reported that it made them feel safe that other users would be verified.
Below is the onboarding prototype and the homepage prototype.
We plan to get more user testing done to fine-tune our app. We want to implement a sign-in method with Google, LinkedIn and Facebook. We plan to add features such as a babysitting matcher, and a 911 quick-call feature if a parent ever feels like they or their child is in danger.
