For the research, I was planning to use three methods: competitive analysis, survey, and user interviews. Unfortunately it was not feasible to research competitors since I had to be a registered parent or staff member to use their apps. Furthermore, I decided not to do a survey and just stick with user interviews since qualitative data matters more for this project. I wanted to know why and how the parents want to get to know other parents and how sharing their personal and their child's information makes them feel. Through user interviews, I was able to learn the concerns and needs of the parents. All of the participants were not very concerned about their privacy since their daycare is small. However, some participants showed concerns about privacy with regards to larger schools. For this reason, I decided to include the option for parents to hide their information in the app. Aside from privacy, the majority of participants wanted to get to know other children and parents.

Here are the major needs and pain points I collected from the user interviews.

In order to keep in mind who I was designing this feature for and what I should focus on, I created a persona to deepen user understandings and empathize with them. I made sure to follow the interview summary carefully since this persona was important to shape the design of the new feature I'm designing. I decided to make a user flow to empathize with users in how they would think and take actions to complete a task. Even though Brightwheel is an app I use every day, I only interact with the staff view, which is different from the parents view. For that reason and to understand the users (the parents) better, I had to do some some secondary research to learn how the app works differently. The overall flow turned out to be simple since the app itself is quite straightforward, which means there are limited complex actions users (the parents) can take.

Before creating wireframes, I sketched out different ideas to organize my thoughts. I followed the style of app for the privacy settings to stay consistent. For the tagged children feature, I tried to imitate other social media apps so that the users are able to adjust to the app easily. I made wireframes before moving on to hi-fidelity design so that I could focus on the flows for the whole app. I based these on the sketches and screenshots from the Brightwheel app. I wanted to focus on putting the privacy settings link somewhere easy to find since it's so important for users. However, the difficult part of this process was the fact that there are essentially two profiles in one app: the child and parent. In the end, I came up with the idea of including a link to the privacy settings on the child's profile page. This way, users can locate it either here or on the main settings page. Once I finished the wireframes, I moved on to hi-fidelity mocks to finalize my designs. While designing, I paid special attention to match the colors and paradigms in the original design. I made three flows for the parent messaging feature: sending a message request, editing privacy settings, and checking message requests. I didn't make any major changes from the wireframes since I mainly followed the design of the app. The only concept that is entirely new to the app is message requests. I researched different message request designs for inspiration, trying to make the notification obvious yet suitable to the original design.

View Prototype

I conducted usability tests to identify frustrations as well as any additional privacy concerns. I used two formats:

• Zoom (3 participants who have a child currently attending daycare)
• Maze (10 participants, preferably parents)

After the usability testing, I summarized the findings so that I could revise the parts of the design that made the users frustrated or confused. I did not hear any major privacy concerns regarding the app and its interface; rather I received comments concerning other features, such as locking the app. As this is such a sensitive topic, I agree with these concerns and ideas; however, they are out of the scope of this project. I decided to make revisions specifically aiming to solve participants' confusion and frustrations from the usability testing. Of course, while making these revisions I matched the original design as much as possible.

It's not easy to empathize with people you are not familiar with. Research is an effective means to understand these people.

Don't assume people will understand something you understand–even small things can make people confused and frustrated; having explanations is helpful.

Technology (such as Brightwheel) can be a powerful tool (making new friends), yet it can create problems at the same time (privacy).