Journee

Primary Research

There were three main problem areas which we wanted to investigate in our user research. These consisted of:

1. Understand what parents are and are not currently doing to instill healthy coping
2. Develop empathy for the concerns and struggles that parents have when trying to instill healthy coping mechanisms in their children
3. Understand what the parent's criteria for success within this problem area would be

Our stakeholders in this case would be parents with children aged 2-5 years old as found from our secondary research who found this age range to be the most crucial for a child’s emotional regulation stages

Questionnaires

The purpose of questionnaires in this research stage was to gain a clearer understanding of emotional regulation in parents, their attitudes alongside their parenting styles or approaches.

To investigate this - we asked parents about their attitudes towards emotional regulation and whether it could be a skill to be taught. In addition they were asked to lists tools they use to consult for help - and their challenges/goals

Online Ethnography

We used online ethnography as a way to get honest insights from parents that were not possible through interviews.

To do so - we consulted Reddit through parenting and self-help subreddits such as r/AskParents, r/parenting, r/toddlers and collected 40-50 qualitative insights from a consistent stakeholder basis (ensuring we stop when data saturation occurs).

Interviews

Semi-structured interviews helped us gain the general context that parents find themselves in when trying to instil healthy coping mechanisms in their child

Questions covered a wide range of topics such as  parenting struggles, parenting tools, difference in roles within parenting units as well as the parents own emotional regulation experiences. Follow-up questions and laddering were used as a way gain further insight as well

Key Insights

The main user insights as stemmed from the 3 main areas of focus for our primary research included:

Ideation

Idea Generation

We used Crazy 8’s initially to create a large quantity of ideas in a short timespan. The Crazy 8 sheets were then passed around - with each member using different post-it notes to develop the ideas further. In addition we also did a brainwriting 6-3-5 activity to stimulate more ideas in this ideation process

Frame Creation

From here - we were able to create frames of our problem area to help us frame and group our ideations during this ideation process better. In the end there were 3 main frames that were used - the “parent-focused” frame, the “relationship” focused frame and the “expectation” focused frame.

3 Concepts

The 3 main concepts we developed were “Calm-After” based on our parent-focused frame, Game-Nite based on our relationship-focused frame and ‘track-ER’ to focus on our expectation-based frame

Concept Selection

We found that parents enjoyed Calm-After in promoting mindfulness however found it lacked feasibility as they would have to step away from their child during guided meditations.

Ultimately we decided to keep Calm-After as our primary concept but also mash-up the elements of data visualisations from track-ER to provide a holistic parental improvement framework (that placed back an emphasis on the parents - not the child as found prior with our research)

To refine our new concept further we also did further research. We found a breakdown of parenting into 5 main important skills according to Robert Epstein’s framework (whom did a 2000 respondent survey to evaluate such parenting skills). These skills involved love and affection, stress management, relationship skills, autonomy and independence and also education and learning as the 5 main parenting skills

Journee

Prototyping (Low-To-High Fidelity)

We decided to switch the name of our app from Calm-After to Journee to act as a play on words of the word journey (a parents self development journey). In addition, Journee as a concept is essentially a parent-centered solution which allows them to take accountability for their strengths and weaknesses.

Through the 3 main tabs: Reflect, Data and Learn, they get a holistic self-awareness and mindfulness in developing as a parent.

Reflect: Parents get to reflect on their parenting each day via daily check-ins to keep themselves accountable. They can also journal to be introspective about their parenting

Data: Parents can see data visualizations of their parenting skills alongside answers from their onboarding and daily-check ins to gain a greater awareness of their  day-to-day parenting

Learn: Parents are recommended resources based on what their lacking skillsets. They are also given personalized challenges to work on their weaknesses.

Final Prototype Video

This is a walkthrough/pitch video of our Journee app: