Our Process
Research
01
To familiarize ourselves with the characteristics of empty-nesters and uncover their unifying pain points, we conducted research including semi-structured interviews and a diary study with a variety of working and stay-at-home empty-nested parents. We also performed competitive analysis on products related to our problem to understand the scope of existing solutions. We analyzed Circle of Moms- an online parent discussion forum, MeetUp- an online group organizer, and 7Cups- an anxiety and stress management application.
Through our research, we found that our users had very different interests and day to day lives, but all acknowledged the surprising mixture of grief, pride, and re-identification of self they felt when their children left the home.
Interviews
The first step of our process was to conduct interviews with our user group. Each member conducted a semi-structured interview with an empty-nested parent, inquiring about their experience with their transition, current methods they use to process the transition, and what challenges they faced upon their children moving out.
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Some of the key findings we deduced from our research include:
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Users from this group are subject to a drastic change in lifestyle—from daily routines to an abundant amount of free time
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Parenthood can be a central part of a person’s identity and adjusting away from it can bring surprising sadness and self-reflection
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Finding friendships can be difficult for empty-nesters who may have relied on their children to connect to other parents
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This information was helpful for us to start thinking about what problems our user group has and what further research was necessary.
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“I guess I just hadn’t realized that [the] parent feeling never ends.”
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-Parent 2, 50 years old with 3 children
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Personas
Using the information and data we gathered from individual interviews, we synthesized the key findings into user personas. Personas are useful tools to understand the overall pains, motivations, and goals of our user group; this in turn helped us determine what specific problem areas we wanted to focus on for our project.
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As we analyzed the data, we realized that we did not have a lot of information on how fathers process the transition. Brief phone and email interviews with empty-nested fathers led us to conclude that they do not struggle with the process as much as mothers appeared to--because of this, our personas embody the perspective of mothers
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Persona 1 - The Full Time Parent
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Persona 2 - The Work/Kid Balancer
User Journey Map
For our next step of the process, we created a display of the interactions our user group may experience on a typical day. Our personas helped us to narrow which archetype we wanted to primarily focus on. From our two users, we decided to create a map for Jennifer because our research indicated that she had a greater need than a Work/Kid Balancer. Jennifer represents the parents whose identities are directly connected to parenthood and, because of this, feel a significant emotional loss.
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The user journey map helped us contextualize the pain points empty-nesters experience on an average day. This was useful for us as we moved forward in the design process so that we could visualize which needs were most prevalent.
02
Ideation
The deliverables from our research helped us launch into brainstorming possible solutions and design requirements for our user's key pain points. We found that the scope of the empty nest problem is large and very personal. However, we were able to extract three equally weighted themes revolving around social, emotional, and lifestyle forms of processing transition.
Design Requirements
Our research findings from our interviews and our synthesis from creating personas and the user journey map helped us conclude that our solution needed to provide the following design requirements:
Storyboards
Our team used our design requirements as a guide for beginning the ideation phase of our design process. We created six different storyboards to convey the narrative for situations users might encounter. We used our storyboards to explore novel possible solutions to our three key design requirements.
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To maximize our brainstorming process and explore different options, each team member individually created two different scenarios detailing solutions to different design requirements. From the six scenarios we created, our team was able to establish the three core functional modules which would form the basis of our solution.
Information Architecture
Our storyboard scenarios indicated the need to create three distinct modules to give empty nesters a way to process their transition using the techniques that would work best for them. To help narrow down each module from a high-level concept to a more concrete set of components, we next created an information architecture (IA) diagram.
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We first split the three modules among the three team members and created rough drafts for each before meeting to combine them. After coming back together as a group, we recognized the importance of presenting a unified solution and modified each module’s diagram to be more consistent. We also created a home screen to help link together the three modules.
By creating the IA diagram, we not only cataloged the screens that we would next need to paper prototype, but also identified the need to purposefully join our separate modules into one solution, a key takeaway that would guide our design in the rest of the process.
Design
03
After iterating through possible interface sketches, our design process included developing paper prototypes of key path scenarios, testing them with members of our user group, and creating annotated wireframes from the feedback.
Paper Prototype
Our storyboards and IA diagram gave us the information necessary to begin creating paper prototypes for three key pathways through our app. Our IA diagram identified the screens we needed to prototype and our storyboard solutions helped to fill in the context of when the process would be used. We created annotated photographed walkthroughs of each of the three prototyped pathways to help define what a successful path through the task would look like and ensure our evaluation procedures were consistent between tests conducted by different members of the team. We decided to prototype an app to be used on tablets because our research suggested that many empty-nesters use these devices; we also thought that larger interface screens would be easier for our users to interact with.
The key tasks we prototyped were:
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Alter mood settings, enter mood of the day, and view mood map​
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Explore trending discussions and interact with a discussion thread and its comments.
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Navigate Go! page to search for events to go to over the weekend.
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Task 1: Alter mood settings, enter mood of the day and view mood map
Task 2: Explore trending discussions and interact with a discussion thread
Task 3: Navigate Go! page to search for events to attend over the weekend
Quick Evaluation Findings
We individually tested our three key paths scenarios with three different users. Our evaluations demonstrated that the screen prototypes we created were generally clear, but several small interactions could be refined further.
The overall improvements that could be made include the following:
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Inconsistent navigation and formatting
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Unclear purpose of reflect, connect, and go functions—i.e. the value of using each feature was not known to our users
The strengths we identified from the testing include:
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Easily identifiable idiomatic icons
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Straightforward interactions (i.e. clear indications of when to swipe, tap, etc.)
Overall the paper prototypes gave us valuable insight on which features to keep and which ones could be improved.
Annotated Wireframes
Using the results from our prototype evaluations and our information architecture diagram as a guide, our team created wireframes for every screen of our app to present a full overview of each module. Although we originally prototyped our app for use on a tablet, after we went back to our research we realized that targeting smartphones would make our app more accessible and convenient to a larger percentage of empty nesters, so we shifted to wireframing for a smartphone app.
We divided our app’s screens into three parts and each team member completed one part individually. As with our information architecture diagram, we initially struggled with consistency issues but were able to recognize them quickly and rectified them to create a unified experience.
The creation of our wireframes helped make our full vision for the app perceptible to others outside of the team, which allowed us to get feedback from others in our class. From this feedback, we learned that what we had initially wireframed was overly complex, so we further iterated our wireframes to make them simpler. We used these revised wireframes as the basis for our hi-fi mockups.
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Product
04
Creating mockups allowed us to visualize a culminating representation of the research and ideation we spent 10 weeks on in a realistic and professional way. However - there is always room for improvement and further research. See our reflection for what we learned and future developments!
High Fidelity Mockups
After getting in-class feedback from our wireframes, we found that people had a hard time understanding the unifying purpose of each feature of the app. Walking others through a single feature of the app required so much time, that each feature seemed as if it could be its own app. In order to address this issue, we reorganized the layout of each feature to have a more consistent format and unify each transition tool. We also developed a more personalized home screen to tie elements of each feature together in one starting place.
