Mobile application for single student mothers
To level up the playing field for an underprivileged group, here specifically single student mothers. This project was for a student design competition.
My team consisted of four students, including me. We all worked together on multiple parts, but my main focus was on competitive analysis and overall application design, including sketches, wireframes and interactive prototype.
We approached the problem by first choosing appropriate target group. Initially, we focused on pregnant women/first-time mothers, but then narrowed down and focused on single student mothers. Then with our pilot study, by conducting preliminary interviews, we identified general patterns and general idea of what we are pursuing as a project.
With further research we have come up with a persona
Then I created a quick set of scenarios to have an idea of potential design requirements
For the competitive analysis, we looked for mobile apps and websites that help single mothers with home, school and family related tasks. There are plenty of available resources, however for the most part they are either very limited, in a sense that they try to tackle only one aspect of a busy mother’s life. Some of the slightly relevant examples are Mama Bear and HomeRoutines.
Mama Bear is an app for keeping track of children, whether it be social media or text messages. HomeRoutines is another app that helps dealing with daily routines by making use of customizable lists. Both of these apps are quite useful for their intended purpose, however they were not designed specifically for single student mothers and do not focus on helping mothers with college related problems.
During brainstorming session, multiple ideas were generated based on pilot study. One was a calendaring application, since multiple interviewees spoke of how important calendar is for their daily lives. Another idea was an organization/planner application to help single student mothers with daily activities for school, home, work and personal. And another idea was a reflection application, that would help single student mothers destress during the day and send motivational quotes to stay in school and get the degree.
Final idea as a result of brainstorming session was a combination of a planner plus a concept we thought of along the way, which we called “Circles”. “Circles” are essentially dedicated groups of people that the user can interact with via text message/email.
All team members explored the visual style and layout through generating initial sketches. Here are some of mine:
After refining sketches, a set of rough wireframes were created by all team members. Here are some of mine:
Interactive prototype, created with Principle for Mac:
Usability Testing revealed several minor issues as well as some suggestions such as ability to add people to “Circles” from contacts list and ability to connect to University Course platforms. Generally, users rated their experience with this application concept highly and said they would definitely use it, if we develop it further.
MomU is an application that was designed specifically for single student mothers.
It consists of a customizable planner and of a concept called “Circles”. “Circles” are dedicated, customizable groups of people who the user trusts in a case of emergency or unexpected events. User can interact with people in a “Circle” via text message/ email by using preset message templates.
Main challenge of this project was finding people from our target audience to interview and conduct usability testing sessions. We chose a very narrow and generally busy group of people as a target audience for this project and it did make things more difficult than it could have been. Several people we found quit or stopped replying at various stages of the project. We also got ahold of relevant campus resources and departments at later stages of the project, which resulted in not being able to use those appropriately.
Some skills gained and things learnt: