Client Work
Happy Marlo
Creating a mobile app to provide parents and caregivers with powerful tools to help their children better manage the emotional roller coaster of growing up.
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Happy Marlo aims to offer practical advice and resources for parents and caregivers, alongside tailored holistic healing content, called Marlo Moments, for children. Through this mobile app design they hoped to:
Deliver absolute clarity to their audience on what they are offering and how it will benefit them
Begin monetizing on their offer and prove product-market fit to investors
THE SCOPE
What makes Happy Marlo special?
BUSINESS GOALS
Children face a variety of issues in their daily lives which affects their ability to focus. With the stigma around mental health and inaccessibility of affordable care options, there is a need for on-demand tools that can help children better manage their emotions.
Over the course of three weeks, our team developed a new mobile app, to compliment Happy Marlo’s existing website, that offers emotional wellbeing resources and experiences for both adults and children.
What does emotional wellbeing mean to you?
THE DISCOVERY
The discovery phase allowed us to understand our client’s vision, synthesize existing surveys, interview our target users, and review the competitor landscape in order to understand user needs, behaviors, and pain points.
To understand our user demographics and familiarity with emotional wellbeing, I analyzed Happy Marlo’s adult surveys from 109 participants.
We created an journey map for Anna to visualize her end-to-end experience when researching and implementing emotional wellbeing advice for her children. This allowed us to represent her frustrations throughout the journey and identify the areas for improvement. This deliverable was really beneficial to pinpoint where the Happy Marlo app could make a difference and alleviate user’s pain points.
DEFINING THE USER PERSONA
To gain further insight of who users are and what users do, we interviewed seven parents/caretakers and seven kids.
Adult Interview Insights
Adults tend to use Google or crowdsource information from other parents to learn more about their children’s wellbeing
Believe that their child’s emotional wellbeing is the responsibility of the parents and schools, yet the schools aren’t doing enough in this area today
They’ve seen an impact on their children’s social intelligence due to Covid
All were open to learning more about holistic techniques that could improve their children’s wellbeing
Children Interview Insights
When speaking to kids ages 6-10, they mentioned they sometime feel anxiety and stress in their day to day lives
In order to combat stress they like to play games, draw, or speak to their family
Almost all children use a tablet when interacting with technology
35-44
The average age of adults caring for young children
62%
Of parents / caregivers had two children
99%
Understand what emotional wellbeing means
81%
Are interested in the resources Happy Marlo will provide
Here’s what they said.
So who are the target users?
Based on the research, it was clear that we were going to have two distinct set of requirements for adults and kids so we created personas types for both. Our primary personas were Anna, a London based mom of two, and Noah, her seven year old son. The first phase of the kids app prioritized children ages 6-11, who have a greater level of independence and autonomy. This will expand to ages 3-11 in the future.
Our personas were used throughout the project to align on user priorities for the design. These two personas were reviewed with our client before we kicked off the design phase to ensure we were aligned on the target users overall goals, needs, and frustrations.
A closer look at the user journey.
Areas for Improvement:
Present clear and factual data for specific issues relating to children
Create a community for parents to source information
Offer access to expert advice
Provide tried and true holistic techniques in one platform to make it easy for parents to find the right approach for their child’s issues
This was my first experience interviewing kids for research and let me tell you, they do not hold back! Their candid honesty was really useful, especially in usability testing.
One of the differentiators of Happy Marlo is that it is focused on kids first, so before we started designing we wanted to do some research on design guidelines for kids. This helped us understand how kids interact with technology and how to design experiences for kids that can improve their brain development and help them play and learn.
Key Considerations:
Design for age group
Use audio and visuals
Integrate learning while playing
Cater to their busy brains
Interaction is key
THE PROBLEM(S)
Through synthesizing our research, we (finally) defined two problems that the app should aim to solve. Below are some of the problem statements we developed during ideation that led us to our final versions.
DESIGNING FOR KIDS
Problem 1:
Anna needs affordable and accessible information about children's mental health so that she can teach kids how to cope with stress and emotional distress.
Problem 2:
Noah needs interactive tools that help him learn about dealing with his feelings to better manage the emotions of growing up.
Solution 1:
Provide relevant emotional wellbeing resources for adults to help them support their kids.
Solution 2:
Create emotional wellbeing interactive experiences and content for kids.
THE DESIGN
Balancing both user needs and business goals, we built out three main flows.
Sign Up / Login
The “Grown-up” Zone with resources such as podcasts, expert interviews, children practitioners, and a community to connect
The “Kiddo” Zone where kids can relax and play by interacting with Marlo Moments, creating their own sound baths, or coloring their favorite Marlo character
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Molding the future, responsibly.
Image source: Toptal (The Definitive Guide to Building Apps for Kids)
Parents need affordable and accessible resources to support their children’s emotional wellbeing so that the children can learn how to effectively work through their feelings.
Children need interactive tools that help them learn about dealing with their feelings due to the increase in anxiety and stress they are experiencing today.
Parents need accessible guidelines to deal with their children’s mental health so that they can teach kids how to cope with stress and emotional distress.
Children need easy way to learn about mental health so that they can work through their feelings.
Children and parents need an efficient accessible holistic methods of improving emotional well being through tech
Parents need interactive tools to be able to work though their children’s problems and handle their stress.
Children need a virtual outlet to provide interactive tools to help them relax and focus.
THE FEEDBACK
Our team conducted two rounds of usability testing to learn how adults and kids interacted with the app.
Ensure text color is accessible and easy to read
Update the navigation bar to include active states and a home button
Make it easier to understand what a "Marlo Moment" is
Adult Key Takeaways - Round 1
Kid Key Takeaways - Round 1
Children were asked to locate and watch a video on how to tap and then explore the app on their own.
Outline the purpose of the app through a short onboarding
Add a bottom navigation bar for kids
Use more visuals for the call to actions to make labels more clear
During the second round of testing, we focused on the overall look and feel of the app. After implementing the feedback from round 1 of testing, users were able to complete the tasks much faster and the feedback provided was minor.
On the Grown-up side, we received feedback on the inconsistency of the call to action button colors so we made them all orange.
On the Kiddo side, adding onboarding screens proved to be really helpful as it gave them insights to what each section contained, but it also led to some errors. Kids had trouble clicking on next and back buttons on those screens so we made the icons larger and added padding to make the clickable areas bigger.
Adults were asked to create an account for Happy Marlo and search for holistic techniques and relevant content that might help their child better manage their anxiety.
Round 1: Let’s focus on the functionality.
Round 2: Does this look okay?
After the first round of testing, it was clear that their was a general confusion of what the holistic techniques named “Marlo Moments” were. The client wanted to keep this name for their unique offering, so we had to brainstorm how to better represent what this contained for new users. Children did not find the app very engaging at this point since the Kiddo zone contained mostly text with little visuals. Back to the drawing board!
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This project was focused on user research, identified needs, and business goals. If there was more time, there are a few areas I would further develop.
On the adult side, I would focus on building out the ability to set-up child profiles as most of our users have multiple children. I would also create the ability for parents to make curated paths for their children, which would be especially helpful for younger children. Both these features were of a lot of interest to our adult testers.
The first thing I would like to do on the kid side is to build a tablet version of the app as almost all children use tablets when interacting with technology. We agreed with the client that we would design mobile first as best practice and also so they could easily show investors how the app would be setup regardless of device.
There are also a few enhancements I would like to make based on the kid usability test observations.
Build out the coloring screen and add more color choices
Add a child check-in similar to the parent child check-in
Show a sound progress bar to know how far along you are in an audio or video file
NEXT STEPS
Feel free to play around with the clickable prototype below!
Let’s see what this thing can do!
THE PROTOTYPE