Introduction
OneBag is a mobile app designed to help busy parents with the massive amount of data that comes along with having a child. What if you could have, in one app, all the contacts, all the measurements and basic medical information (blood type, vision, hearing etc) associated with your child. This is what OneBag does.
If you use OneBag you’ll be able to find Ben’s father’s name, your child’s shoe size and her blood type, all there a tap or two away.
The Challenge
Being a parent to children, even if it’s just one child, brings with it oodles of information and no one place to store all of it.
In the span of one day, you, the parent, might need the address of your kid’s best friend, her shirt size and her dentist’s name. Currently you would need to call, text, email and search numerous people for this information. OneBag brings all this information to one place.
Research
Unlike any other project in my life the end user as well as market research for this product began with me. I was the subject.
As a father I began to realise that I had nowhere to store all the data that my son was generating, and when day-car began, I began to test the need with other parents.
What followed was a lengthy market research with parents, possible competitors, mobile platforms in order to test if this idea can actually work. The research and testing continues today as the product is evolving.
Define
The end users are a broad group made out of new parents regardless of their age. In the game of “kid info” if you don’t start them young, there is no going back.
The app requirements are: easy to learn and quick to use. Parents to young kids have little time to read the manual.
Ideate
The first overarching idea for oneBag is that the app needs to grow and expand with the child. An app that can’t accommodate adding additional pieces of information will not work for parents.
The second overarching idea is that categorising information should be easy and customisable. Some kids have more kids of doctors or teachers than others.
Prototype
Prototyping for this project consisted of many dozens of drawings and redrawing of the various screens of the app. Not surprisingly the prototyping began first around the main screens and only then back to more basic screens such as the registration flows and Add New Record flow screens.
Test
Testing for this project followed two distinct and different paths.
First, the less formal path consisted of random, walk-up tests of parents I interacted with in various school and playground settings. During these sessions, participants would be asked to perform tasks central to the app in order to capture their joy/pain points with the app flow. As they were informal, some of these tests included giving users the app and seeing their discovery process, the process by which users learn the app initially.
The second testing path was more formal and included settings devoid of kids and other such “distractions”. This this testing phase the users had to go through a flow including: registration, initial set up of a child who’s data we will be collecting, and sharing of a specific data file for the child the user set up on the system.