Duration
4 months
Role
Team
Context
An early-stage startup approached our team at Single Quote with the following brief: to create a medium for new parents to easily share tasks with their friends and families. After five months of collaboration the result of that brief is Mamoon, an Android & iOS app to help new parents get better social support. For this project, I was in charge of the entire design process, from research to ideation and prototyping. I also worked as a front-end developer alongside my associate to build the app using React Native.
Research learnings
Talking to the founders of Mamoon, we gathered as much information as we could. We also conducted secondary research and talked to new parents to better understand their needs. The main takeaways from our research was:
Asking for help via text gets messy as it's hard to keep track
Group chats lack privacy
Shared task lists are not tailored to parent needs
Asking for help with current solutions increases stress
53%
of expectant and new parents receive help from family, 40% from friends
48%
feel like they don't get the support they need when feeling stressed
43%
of new parents say becoming a parent was more difficult than they thought
45%
say they would have wanted more support from friends and family
Explorations
Due to limited resources and time constraints, we unfortunately weren't able to test our prototypes directly with users. We held multiple sessions with the founders of Mamoon to test and validate our ideas. These are some of our early UI explorations.
Solution
Accounts
Mamoon's main goal is to help new parents save time, so we tried to get out of their way as much as possible. Our signup process is quick with an emphasis on using social accounts to get setup as fast as possible.
Groups
New parents pointed out that group chats were not optimal. While they allowed them to reach all their immediate support groups (parents, siblings, friends…) at once, they didn't always want to share information with everyone. So they ended up texting individual people, defeating the purpose of creating a group chat in the first place. So we came up with a solution.
New parents can create groups and invite their support groups, with privacy at the center of that feature.
Tasks
Once they've added people to their groups, new parents can start creating and assigning tasks. With privacy in mind, tasks can either be offered to everyone in the group or select members.
Once a task is created, it's automatically sent to all potential assignees via push notifications. With tasks, Mamoon shines where to-do lists shy thanks to a proposal and acceptation system. Created tasks are sent to a pool of users, and the first to accept a task becomes its sole owner.
On the helper's side, they receive a notification when a new task has been assigned to them, and they can view the lists of all their pending ones directly on the app.
Once they accept a task, it's moved to their to-do list and added to their native calendar. They can then update its status once it's done. With this system, new parents can easily share tasks with their support system without having to worry about privacy.
Calendar
We added a calendar to give both new parents and helpers an overview of their upcoming tasks. All tasks are also automatically added to a helper's native calendar app when accepted.
Achievements and learnings
Designing for an early-stage startup can be difficult, especially when it doesn't already have product-market fit or an MVP. There are no users to talk to, and little evidence to base your design decisions on. This said, this project forced me to communicate with stakeholders often and well. Secondary research is better than no research. Internal testing is better than no testing. I also learned a lot about designing for mobile, especially Apple's Human Interface Guidelines. I also wish we could have helped Mamoon measure the success of and iterate on the product.
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