My Role
UX Research, Information Architecture, User Flows and Personas UX Design, Hi-fi Mockups, Interaction Design, User Testing, Prototyping, Design System, Project Management
Tools
Figma, Miro, UserTesting.com, Paper & Sharpie
Duration
4 months
Year
Spring 2023
Problem Statement
The excessive consumption and disposal of children's items by parents, driven by a desire to support their children's growth and development, leads to significant resource wastage and environmental harm on a global scale.
Our goal is to balance child development with eco-friendly practices.
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Design Process
Discover
Market analysis
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Market Size: The global children's items market, including toys, clothing, furniture, and education products, exceeds $100 billion annually.
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Environmental Awareness: Rising awareness of environmental impacts from excessive consumption fosters demand for sustainable alternatives.
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Consumer Preference: Many parents are willing to pay more for sustainable kids' items.
What is happening today?
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Yard sale
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Facebook marketplace
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Giveaways
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Toy swap events
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Facebook groups
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Thrift stores - Goodwill
Competitive analysis
There are many competitors in the market globally who have built sustainable toys that help in children's functional and educational growth. A few of these companies are:
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Toy Around
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Lovevery
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Toycycle
​
We performed the competitive analysis to understand:
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Different reward systems
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How to inculcate habits
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How does swapping/selling work
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How does a Subscription-based model work
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Secondary Research: What are the benefits of toy swapping?
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Sharing helps children make and keep friends and cooperate with people.
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Children get better at sharing as they learn to manage emotions and see other points of view.
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Help children learn to share by praising sharing and giving them opportunities to practice.
Research Goal
To understand how parents buy, sell or exchange used children’s products and how their children feel about the process?
User Interview Plan
Define
Affinity Mapping
We received a lot of valuable pain points from the user interviews - but to put together the repetitive ones, we created an affinity diagram. That helped us identify the common issues that we would consider in crafting our solution application.
Here is what our affinity diagram looked like:
User Research Findings
1
Broad insights
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Parents must continually purchase products
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Children outgrow things fast
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Difficult to shop offline with kids
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Accept hands me down and donate
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Selling is rare
Solutions
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A marketplace to receive and donate used children’s products
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Kids can choose what they want from used products
2
Broad insights
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Parents involve children in selecting items
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Children are very vocal about the things they like/need
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A parent’s decision is influenced by multiple factors
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Making children accountable
Solutions
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Involving the child in the process of product selection on the app
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AI recommends products based on age appropriateness, expert advice, buying behavior, reviews, etc.
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Gamification in helping in a child’s development
3
Broad insights
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Some parents involve the children in the process of donation
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Use concepts like “giving joy” on Christmas and “growing up” on birthdays
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Use storytelling, and games to teach empathy and sharing. Eg. playdates, toy swaps
Solutions
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Involve the child in the process of donation through the app’s user flow
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Use storytelling, games, and concepts to inculcate sharing in children through app content
Vision
Bring joy and learning into children's lives by providing products in a sustainable and cost-effective manner while enabling socio emotional development.
User Personas
Working Mom
Student
Working Mom
Information Architecture
Ideate
Low-Fidelity Sketches
Once we had our features, information architecture, and style guide in place, we moved on to the ideation of a few of the app's main pages.
We used a whiteboard to make sketches of screens collaboratively.
Once we finalized a particular design for the screen, we created low-fidelity wireframes.
Mid-Fi prototyping and testing
• After establishing flows in lo-fi wireframes, we moved on to create mid-fidelity prototypes for 5 flows through the app’s main functions.
• We tested these with 2 users in a moderated in-person session.
Hi-Fi prototyping and testing
• With the insights from Mid-fi prototype testing, we moved on to creating Hi-fi prototypes. After adding imagery, the screens started making more sense to the users.
• We conducted 1st round of testing with 9 users on usertesting.com and got constructive feedback.
• Implementing those insights, we moved to 2nd round of testing on usertesting.com with 3 users, which helped us refine our overall app.
