Family Fail

• user interviews
• user flows
• sketching
• wireframing with Balsamiq
• rapid design iteration

MISSION

To create an app that enables parents to help their children with social-emotional learning.

Following discovery, including user interviews and research, I developed the following Problem Statement and Solution.

Problem Statement

Alice is a mom to a 5-year old boy and an 8-year old girl. She worries that our culture focuses too much on children’s happiness and that we are afraid to let our children fail. She knows she needs to model this behavior for her children, but she can’t seem to make herself do it.

Proposed Solution

I developed an app that turns failure into a fun family game. The family completes activities together that are designed to fail, learning that (1) failure doesn’t have to be painful and (2) sometimes you actually succeed when you were sure you would fail.

the process

user interviews

I started out with user interviews. I interviewed 5 parents and one middle-school teacher to try to discover what parents’ concerns were, whether they talked with their children about emotions and how they handled negative emotions. I discovered that parents:

• want their children to be happy

• don’t want their children to suffer anxiety or go through hard social situations

• don’t know how to help their children with feelings of failure

• talk to their children a lot about feelings, and they aren’t having trouble getting their children to talk to them

I decided to dig further into the one about failure.

research

I did some research on fear of failure and social emotional development. I found that learning to overcome fear of failure is indeed critical to social emotional development.

Next I looked to see what apps already existed to help children and parents with this issue. I found none.

design iterations and user feedback

I moved on to developing my app, which I titled Family Fail. I brainstormed ideas, made lists of activities, drew rough sketches, figured out user flows and sketched out some wireframes. Then I created a paper prototype for 2 user flows that I could test — when a family first came to the app and when they returned to complete an activity on a subsequent visit.

The first paper prototype
Here’s the first version of the flow of a family visiting the app for the first time:

When I tested the prototype, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive: “it puts a positive spin on failure”, “targets a real pain point”, “kid-friendly”. I also received helpful suggestions to improve the navigation in the app, that the on-boarding process was too long and that my screens were text-heavy.

The second paper prototype
Therefore, in my second prototype, I made the following changes:

• added a global navigation bar to the bottom

• added back and close buttons to the top

• on-boarding was pushed back and integrated into the first challenge

• reduced text and added images

Here’s the same flow in the second iteration:

The feedback I received on my second paper prototype was that I needed to give parents a little more information to help them use the app successfully with their children — to explain the why, when, where and how of using the app.

The Balsamiq prototype
So when I built out my clickable prototype in Balsamiq, I added information pages at the end of the first challenge, in the categories section and post-activity.

Here is the screen flow for when a family visits the app for the first time:

In the Balsamiq prototype, I also built out more pages, including pages for viewing points earned and progress, a page to view activities that have been saved for later, and a page to view activities that have already been completed.

Here is the journey through the app to complete a new failure activity:

challenges and what I learned

• This project was given to me on the second day of class, and we were asked to go right out and do user interviews. I was a bit terrified. But I did it, and I learned how critical user interviews can be to the process. And that random people in Whole Foods are actually a lot nicer than you might expect them to be when approached by a stranger with questions.

• Personally, I often have trouble getting my son to give me more than one-word answers, so that’s what I thought I’d hear from other parents. But — at least among the parents I talked to — that was not the case at all. This was a good reminder that we are NOT designing for ourselves.

• I learned to trust the process. I was at first overwhelmed by trying to figure out where I could make a difference in the lives of at-risk youth. But as I went through the process, a solution to a critical pain point began to emerge.

• I learned how useful it is to get user feedback as early and often as possible. Even with a simple paper prototype, I got feedback that helped me vastly improve multiple times.

• And finally, I learned how much I love finding solutions that can make a difference in people’s lives.

want to know more?

Let’s talk.

You can read my full case study on Medium by clicking here.

< Previous project
Federal Trade Commission

Next project >
International Monetary Fund