Overview

Akily is an app, for parents and caregivers, created to deliver personalized activities to nurture kids' six main developmental areas using a natural approach. Each activity breaks down complex tasks into easy and entertaining activities, using items and tools you'd find at home, in order to boost their abilities and skills.

The essence at Akily is that every child is unique and so is their natural developmental process. This process is not linear and is not the same for every kid. The Akily algorithm guides you by combining decisions with user feedback on each activity to deliver a personalized path.

We also encourage parents and caregivers to create memories of every milestone the child has achieved.

At the end of 2020, we started working on a new approach to fulfill the needs of the users and implement new features with the aim of increasing user engagement.

My role

End-to-end UX Designer

working with the UX researcher, development team and co-founders (CEO and Head of product)

Mission

A new approach to fulfill the needs of the users and implement new features with the aim of increasing user engagement

Time line

Nov 2020 - Present

Strategy

Design-Thinking-‘Double-Diamond’-Process-Model-2.png

Discover

Finding context

When I first started working at Akily, the second version of the app was ready to launch. This version included the new re-design with a strong brand identity.

The CEO and Head of product proceeded to explain the back-end and the algorithm's decision-making process, which is the backbone of the app. This algorithm was based on the Stepping-block method created over years of research by the head of product. This algorithm allows us to deliver personalized, easy and fun activities for your child.

They also explained the business goals they had at the time and the previous user research they had done.

At this moment, I started to read more about child development and the six main developmental areas the app worked with, in order to fully understand the assignment.

1.1

Competitive Analysis

It is essential to understand the industry, and our direct and indirect competitors. We found our areas of opportunity and our strengths. I carried out a deep competitive analysis of three child development startups already positioned in the market.

In this analysis, I broke down the customer journey of each one of the apps and wrote down my thoughts and stakeholders' opinions. We identified the interesting attributes of those startups and the details we believed to be Akily's strengths.

This analysis enabled us to create hypotheses and plan which opportunity areas we had to put our efforts toward user experience research and design.

1.2

Heuristic evaluation

I analyzed and performed the 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design from Nielsen Norman Group and the Psychological usability heuristics to find the areas of opportunity in the new app. This helped me create a new and robust design system and to establish a consistent design through the app.

1.3

Stakeholders interviews

Stakeholders provided us with their unique knowledge of the back-end processes and the psychological method they had developed to create the algorithm behind the app. They gave us their business goals and elaborated on solutions they had previously tried that did not work.

Explorative Research

When we started at Akily, we realized the last user interviews and research were from 2018. We didn't have adequate information to come up with a plan. We had many hypotheses, but no clear data about the users of the app.

So we started with two main UX research techniques.

User interviews
User testing.

1.3

User interviews

We decided to get to know our users by conducting explorative interviews. We also interviewed parents and caregivers that were not familiar with our app to have a different approach.

Objetives

Identify the information that is relevant to the parents and caregivers regarding child development.
Specify where the users find that information and what they do with that knowledge about child development.
Understand the efforts and actions parents do to nurture their children in different developmental areas.
Comprehend the biggest concerns and doubts that parents have about their child's development.
Explore the resources they have to help their children reach their milestones.
Pinpoint the preferred activities and games the parents do with their children.
Identify the mental model of the parents in regard to the expectations they have from a child development app.

1.4

User test

We wanted to know how the users interacted with the previous version of the app. This was intended to have a clear understanding how information that was delivered and how the users felt about it.

Objetives

Understand how the user interacts with the app.
Point out the possible issues the user might have while using the app.
Classify the usability issues found by severity.
Determinate the emotions and values users have about each function inside the app.
Analyze the positive and negative impacts of each of the segments inside the app.

Define

Analyzing Research

We gathered all the information from the research and started analyzing it. We reviewed this information and presented the results to the co-founders, and then began ideating and defining functionalities to implement in the app.

The research methods we used:

Affinity diagrams
Empathy maps
Card sorting
User journey map
Kano analysis

2.1

Findings - User reasearch

Parents did not have extensive knowledge about child development or the existing developmental areas.
They wanted to learn about activities that could help their child achieve milestones.
They would like to have clear and easy-to-read information related to child development.
They were willing to have direct contact with an expert to solve their doubts.
They preferred having personalized activities for each kid.
Severe dislike of comparing kids' progress to other kids.
Most parents were not aware of child development metrics and standards. And the few that knew the important milestones, were not sure if they met the standards or not.

Findings - User test

Some Illustrations were not related to the information delivered and that created confusion among the users
Some functions were not clear, leading to the user ignoring the feature.
Parents were not comfortable sharing some information, they wanted to protect their and the child's personal information.
The overall functionality of the app was slow and had many bugs.
Parents needed to understand how an activity helped the child's developmental process.
Parents were looking forward to having more activities.
There was one entire section that was not clear and served no purpose to the user.

Develop

Ideation

Having defined the insights, we started developing some hypotheses and planning our next steps. At this moment, we used the Effort Matrix to align our priorities. Some of the ideas we decided to work on:

Step-by-step instructions to complete an activity.
Communicate why the algorithm chose an activity for your child.
Define the time required to complete an activity.
Provide the option of contacting child development professionals.
Add additional resources for parents and caregivers.

User flow diagrams

The next step was to split the app into sections and prioritize tasks based on importance and time required. Each task then became a Design Sprint, where the stakeholders were involved for their feedback. And it was my job to translate their insights into something digitally viable.

My ideation process started with sketches in my notebooks for initial concepts. Once I had a concept, I started working on the user flow diagrams.

The user flow diagrams helped me understand how the app would work end-to-end. We reviewed these user flows with all the stakeholders and received their feedback. These diagrams ensured that we did not miss anything in the process, especially on the technical side.

Example of user flow diagram from a specific section on the app.

Wireframing

Once the user flow diagrams were completed, I went ahead to create the wireframes.

Wireframes help establish the basic structure of the app, focusing on the user experience, navigation, functionality, information architecture, and usability tests.

We had some hypotheses determined from past user research. However, if some of them didn´t work when tested, creating wireframes was the fastest way to change our strategies.

As I mentioned before, I divided the re-design of the app into sections. The more complex sections required the most iterations and the process continued until the user's needs were satisfied.

Example of the wireframes created

Usability tests

In every design sprint, I received the stakeholder's feedback and the user's insights from the usability tests. We iterated these wireframes several times. Occasionally, we had multiple concepts to test, and we used the A|B testing technique to create the best user experience.

Deliver

Hi-fi prototypes

Once we defined the new user flow, navigation, and functionality, I had to incorporate the brand style guidelines and look & feel into the wireframes. But I first needed to create a new Design System. In this new system, I added more colors, icons, components and patterns, that helped me maintain consistency throughout the app. This was also useful to accelerate my prototype design process.

Our research didn't stop there. We constantly carried out user tests with these Hi-fi prototypes and made iterations based on the results, and repeated the process until all the stakeholders were satisfied.

Create development specifications

After testing and defining the final designs, I wrote the specifications using wireflows to document user interaction goals. This was a key step in making sure that the design and development teams worked hand-in-hand.

The specifications included essential information related to the back-end, and the inputs and outputs the app would have to ensure that user experience goals were met.

Learnings

Final test

It was then my job to test the functionality of the new version before it was released. I had to identify and point out all the bugs and UI issues that I found. Every small detail was documented in a special form for the developers to fix.

Learnings

1. Small steps to tackle big goals

Looking back, I realize the amount of work that has been done. Breaking down the big goals into small and easy tasks helped me keep track of our progress and also ensured that we achieved our objectives while perfecting every detail.

2. Prioritize tasks

Efficiently distribute your time and resources based on your objectives. The effort matrix helped us prioritize tasks based on time constraints, resources available and the complexity of the task itself. It also gave us clarity as to which objectives were attainable and which were 'Wish list' tasks.

3. Get as much feedback as possible

Do not be afraid to ask for feedback from your users, stakeholders, experts and other designers. Having different perspectives made me identify my opportunity areas and think of better ways to improve the app's user experience as well as my design process. It has also made me a better critic of my own work.

4. Some ideas don't work, so let them go.

One of our main objectives was to increase engagement with the users, and we had some great ideas we wanted to implement. When testing them, those ideas didn't get the acceptance we hoped for from the users. So we had to go back to the drawing board.

5. Improve the research questions.

I would have phrased some of the initial interview questions differently. After reading "The Mom Test", I realized that some of those initial interviews had questions that inclined the interviewee to give us unreal optimistic responses, which made our findings somewhat inaccurate. Towards the end, our interviews were a lot more helpful because we did not repeat these errors and spent a considerable amount of time phrasing our questions.