Overview
With culture ever-evolving, the traditional picture of marriage and family life has also shifted. People are getting married later and having children in uniquely structured households. This also means that new spaces of struggle and improvement have emerged.
Over the course of ten weeks, we have researched and developed a mobile application to facilitate better efficient communication between single parents and their support system. As we dug deeper into the topic many single parents voiced that they would not be able to do it all without their support system. They valued those around them who have been able to lend a hand; but also struggled to find time for themselves. With this application, we hope to simplify interactions between single parents and their support members.
Problem Statement
Parenting is hard enough as it is when there are two people involved, So when the picture is torn there are challenging obstacles to tackle. Single parents find it hard to balance their day to day schedule, especially if they have work and have multiple children. In addition, communicating with their support system can be a tedious and time consuming task due to the number of details that need to be relayed. Details about availability, distance, and location specifications can create prolonged back-and-forth conversations.
Parents United
help single parents communicate more efficiently and effectively with support members
REFLECT
Starting is always the hardest part. First, we needed to pick a group to design for. After brainstorming over 30 possibilities and two rounds of cuts we finally landed on single parents. We chose single parents because each of us had a personal connection to a single parent. Single parents are a sort of unsung hero and we felt it was time to shine a light on them.
Our biggest challenge throughout the whole process was narrowing the scope of our project and committing to a direction we wanted to pursue. Once we conducted our research we discovered a number of pain points, goals and desires we could address in our design solution. The hardest part was identifying a problem that was specific to single parents. For example, some of their problems included making a budget and running errands. However, anyone can experience those problems. After reviewing our research several times we eventually came to the following design question: How might we facilitate better communication between single parents and their support system?
Something we would have liked to have done differently would have been to test the paper prototype with single parents. This would have provided us with feedback from our intended user group about the needs our design supports and where it could be improved. However, due to time constraints and other circumstances this was not possible.
Given more time we would have extended our research to more single parents and support members. Our research was limited to four interviews with single parents and four analyses of available services. Our design involves two user groups; single parents and support members. Our research solely focused on single parents. We recognize that it is also important to address what support member need in able to help. Additionally, with more research at our disposal we would like to explore some of our stretch goals listed below.
Stretch goals
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Grow the user’s support system via “friends of friends” model
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Schedule social events for single parents
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Connect single parents with similar challenges together
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Help parents find time for themselves in their schedule
Meet the Team
Grace Zhu
Katie Yang
Aylee Neff
