Brood

Description

Brood is a calendar app that assists families in staying organized and connected while remaining accessible for a diverse group of ages.

Project Challenges

1) Design an organizational app that is appealing and accessible for both child and adult users.

2) Create an inclusive experience for all families.

3) Design a cohesive visual brand identity that reflects the app material.

Timeline

December 2024

Role

UX/UI Designer
Branding
Product Designer

Responsibilities

Research, persona creation, wireframing, information architecture, low and high-fidelity prototyping, conducting usability studies, branding and visual design

Getting Started

Before diving into designing, I hosted interviews to get a better sense of users' wants, needs, and motivations. I interviewed five parents via Zoom, entering each interview with a few key questions in mind:

"How can we keep families engaged and connected?"

"How do we cater to both child and adult users?"

"What services do users want in a family-centered app?"

Through affinity mapping I gained insight into how families organize themselves, who was involved in day-to-day family care, and how tech-savvy children can be.

Family Management

5/5 participants write down their family's schedules

2/5 participants utilize whiteboards for their family to check tasks and schedules

3/5 participants have at least a personal digital or physical calendar

Care Involvement

5/5 participants need their children to be driven to school and activities

1/5 participants have a nanny involved in day-to-day care

1/5 participants have and extended family member who is involved in child care

Child Technology Use

5/5 participants have children with access to devices

4/5 participants have children who have phones

2/5 participants have children with unmonitored phone access

Competitor Research

When analyzing competitors, I looked at Google Calendar, Cozi, Family Calendar, and FamCal. I paid particular attention to how these apps catered to a diverse age range of users and how they visually formatted calendar days that had many scheduled events and tasks. Each app allows for a single day calendar view and an expanded calendar view complete with color coding features, allowing for an easy way to organize different users and task types.

What can we do different?

While color coding is a fun, easy way to organize schedules, all apps except for Google Calendar have limited accessibility options for those with vision difficulties and colorblindness. These apps also don't have much in terms of parental controls, where parents desire more ways to monitor and control their young children's device usage.

Defining

Based on research and data collected from the interviews, we can begin to address our initial research questions.

Keeping Families Connected

Parents want a way to easily notify their children of upcoming events or changes in plans. No more ignoring text messages!

Adult and Child Users

Parents want a way to monitor and control child app access and controls. Young children aren't trusted with unlimited phone use.

Desired Services

Parents want a way to organize their family's busy schedules neatly without running out of space on calendars.

Personas

In order to better empathize with users, I developed personas based off of the primary user groups.

Beginning to Design

Information Architecture

At the start of the design process I developed an initial sitemap of key features I wanted included in the app.

Putting Pen to Paper

After getting a sense of basic user flows, I started sketching wireframes to begin building a visual format for the app.

Iterating and Iterating

After creating plenty of paper variations, I began to digitize my drawings.

But we're not done yet!

After finishing the digital wireframes, I recruited ten participants for a usability test. The test was formatted virtually, and participants were asked to navigate through a low-fidelity prototype while recording their experience. The findings were as follows:

Wait, you can swipe?

Participants were unaware that they could swipe through screens once completing the setup stage and never utilized this feature.

Let's trash this!

Participants wanted a quick way to exit the "add task" menu without having to continuously press the back arrow.

Addressing Challenges

Appealing to All Ages

Brood strives to engage with all members of the family, regardless of age or level of technology familiarity. I created a colorful visual style that is clean, modern, and playful to entice younger users and still be easy to navigate. Users can quickly access all main functions of the app at any point with clearly labeled functions, reducing confusion and keeping things simple.

Including Everyone

Sometimes we forget how diverse families can be, and Brood makes sure to remember. When signing up your family, users are given a diverse range of options to choose from in terms of caregivers, extended family, and more. Families are encouraged to add nannies and others involved in daily family life to keep them in the loop, but hosts still have the ability to restrict users from certain features if desired.

Cohesive Visual Identity

Brood utilizes a bright color palette balanced by white backgrounds and gray visual elements to grab users' attention while retaining a sleek look and feel. Rounded edges and soft shadows make for an inviting and clean interface.

Style Guide

Brood's visual style relies on bright, fun pops of color balanced by white and gray neutrals to create both a sleek and playful look. Colorful gradient buttons with bold outlines direct users throughout the app, with pink used to highlight and capture user attention toward points of interest and selection. Large soft edge icons create a kid-friendly interface.

Final Designs

Key Takeaways

Keeping things simple.

While it's tempting to think big and incorporate many diverse features, including extra services such as recipe collections, separate task lists, and more, having too many features made navigating the app frustrating and difficult for elderly and child users. While other family calendar apps may have these extra features, they're not designed with age accessibility considerations. Sometimes it's better to focus on a few core features than to cram in too many!