With the design goals in mind, we began sketching out some of the prioritized ideas to provide more context and establish common ground for the team. Because of its relative low-cost and least dependence on advanced technology that our target user might not have access to, my idea of a child workspace kit was chosen as our first design concept.
Child Workspace Kit: creating a personal space for under-resourced children with affordable materials
Since children from low-resourced households often don't have a place of them own, a box full of materials to set up a designated child workspace would be conducive to an active learning environment, but we quickly learned that it wasn't enough. How might we keep children engaged with this newfound setup? How might we create equitable access to active learning beyond the pandemic? Out of our ambition to support child development and alleviate parental stress in the long run, Kids at Home was born.
Solution
Kids at Home is an affordable subscription service that hopes to support child development at home by providing physical materials to establish a child workspace, weekly activities to encourage active learning and play, and a supplemental app for more activities using household items.
Kids at Home User Journey
Let's break it down.
1. Sign up and receive box
It all begins with the parent signing up for the subscription service and receiving a starter kit. This kit is a large cardboard box that contains all of the materials necessary to set up a child’s work/play space, along with basic crafts materials and print-out instructions on, well, how to set up the space.
The workspace set up is intended to give children feelings of agency and comfort by creating an independent space for the child to call their own, combating the lack of space that children in low-income families often face.
2. connect to app
In addition to the physical experience, we decided to design an app (oh-so-inspiring) to supplement the holistic experience. The app can be used for a few different things, but it is first and foremost a free library of in-house activity ideas using commonly found household items. These activities take into consideration difficulty levels, educational outcomes, and time commitment. This is designed to help parents or babysitters come up with play and learning activities for their child, as well as lift some financial burden off of parents of having to always buy new play things and materials for their children.
Find a plethora of play activity ideas using common household items.
3. receive weekly activities
The experience also includes weekly envelopes delivered to families. In these envelopes are tailored activity sheets along with necessary materials. The weekly activities engage children in play learning with readily available materials and provide relief to parents by minimizing the cognitive load that comes with preparing new and engaging activities for children.
Readily usable play materials along with instructions arrive in the mail weekly.
4. clean up
We learned early on that some parents were stressed about having to clean up after the child after every playtime. The app turns cleanup into a game with a timer, song player, and a list of helpful tips for parents. Besides, we introduced a physical sand timer as one of the first weekly mail activities offered. The sand timer serves the same purpose of creating a time constraint, but this way a child can create a personal attachment to the timer and even better visualize the time slipping by. It serves as an alternative to the app so parents can have their mobile devices if needed at the time.
The app gamifies cleanup with a timer & a dedicated song. But how about building an actual sand timer?
Snapshots of kids at home in action
scenario #1
A child workspace can be easily set up anywhere in the house using materials from the starter kit. It blocks out visual distractions for children and encourages a sense of agency over their surroundings. A seven-year-old is testing the starter kit in the image!
scenario #2
This Photoshop masterpiece illustrates how a child can complete an activity on the dining table while a parent or guardian works in the kitchen. It allows parents to focus less on childcare and more on other responsibilities, like their jobs or housekeeping.
scenario #3
After their playtime, a gamified challenge could intrinsically motivate the child to clean up. A dedicated clean up song also helps to establish a routine.
As the concept took sufficient shape, we even got to do a little branding + marketing.
Evaluation
We sought a lot of feedback. Our team conducted product walkthroughs with subject matter experts, interviews with parents, usability testing of the app, and user testing with children on the physical prototypes. We also regularly participated in design critiques, and I went as far as to pitch the idea to a handful of seasoned entrepreneurs.
First, our design resonated with parents.
“Anything helps to get through the day.”
Participants struggled to juggle work and child care. They also worried about the long-term impact the pandemic would have on their child’s learning. Speaking of the ad-hoc educational environment right now, a participant warned that “We’re in a very dangerous time as parents.” Several participants we interviewed willingly offered to test the prototypes, which we took as a sign of interest.
But we also had to change a few things.
1. more paper instructions
In-app guide on how to unbox and set up the space—completely optional!
These set-up instructions still exist in the app, but we've made them optional by including print instructions so that it's not necessary to go through the app onboarding to know how to set up. #undesign #low-tech
2. using intrinsic motivation
While some kids come to their parents for things to do, others dislike being told what to do. We learned that it is important to give children control in terms of choosing the activities for themselves. While our product has a variety of offerings and the app contains daily suggestions along with search and filter abilities, these could definitely be more developed, and a next step would be to add more variety to the weekly mails.
On the same note, we discarded the idea of incorporating a memento board in Kids at Home as intrinsic motivation tends to decrease when external rewards are given.
3. a customized curriculum
We observed that parenting styles and child development vary greatly by age and even household. Children at different ages and developmental stages will have different play needs. It is crucial for any play activity to be age-appropriate, making sure that it is something children can complete and targets their capabilities. This would also prevent children from getting frustrated when they cannot troubleshoot the activities on their own.
In its final iteration, Kids at Home will progress according to a customized curriculum and parents can track the progress on the app. The curriculum is specifically designed to support key milestones sorted into 5 categories of child development.
A serious note:
The milestones serve as a general guide for parents to help them understand how their child is growing and to alleviate certain stresses they may have about parenting effectively. It is important to emphasize that all children develop at their own pace and there is no one specific way to evaluate child development.
Here are a few sample activities intended for different levels of skills and ages.
Finale
Our design in the world
Stakeholder Map
As the stakeholder map illustrates, child well-being is influenced by many factors, and our solution is going to be embedded in a larger system consisting of various stakeholders. Presently, it focuses on the dire needs of two groups—parents and children.
What's different now
It alleviates parental stress by providing quality play activities for children to do & makes their life a little easier as it allows them to multitask or know their kid is engaging in meaningful activities when looked after by someone else.
It harnesses the thoroughly researched power of interactive play and is designed to support both child agency and development. Empirically, our activities were liked by children during testing sessions.
From having to put the kids in front of the TV to facilitating play learning in spite of the pandemic, I'd say that's a win.
future directions
1. share your work
Since the pandemic has caused a loss of social interaction for many children, and peers are important actors of an active learning environment, we would like to restore some of that social interaction by encouraging sharing in our app and incorporating activities that rely on social connections. We hope this creates additional social motivation for kids to stay interested.
2. find playdates
Another future step could be to facilitate playdates because some kids are likely to be more motivated when doing the activities with a peer. To maintain social distancing, this would involve the distribution of partner activities that require children to work together via video or audio call which parents can help set up.
where it went wrong
In today's world, every good idea has competition, and it manifested itself in this story. Because we started broad and later reframed our problem statement in the design process, some conceptually similar products didn't come to our attention until we ourselves had a good idea of what we were designing, which was fairly late. In the process of additional competitive analysis and user interviews, I discovered that there are a ton of kids craft subscription boxes out there and some of them are reasonably affordable. Had we found out about these products earlier, we would have more time to deliver a more unique promise of value with Kids at Home and take into consideration existing patterns for these boxes.
Despite using multiple avenues for recruitment, none of the participants we interviewed actually qualified as low-income. In order to reach the hard-to-reach, extended timeframes, plan for higher resourcing costs and community partnerships will need to be acknowledged.
parting reflections
Design Thinking, vintage.
Be where the users are (but also, covid is still a thing.) While our team were only interested in consulting subject matter experts due to COVID-19 constraints initially, I continuously advocated for co-designing with real users and convinced the team to engage in user research with parents from the Ithaca area as I believe it is our responsibility as designers to develop empathy before anything else. To do this, I designed study posters, reached out to personal contacts, joined relevant Facebook groups and forums as means to recruit participants, and led most of our user research/evaluation efforts. As a result, we gained a much deeper insight into the day-to-day challenges that families with young children face and were able to contextualize our solution as well as making better iterations.
Lastly, although Kids at Home is not a novel concept, its success lies in its holistic approach and variation that encompasses a large range of children ages and interests. The physical experience is supplemented by the virtual one throughout an extended period of time, making it a sustainable solution that can last beyond the pandemic. The issue of educational quality disparity is a wicked problem, but Kids at Home attempts to mitigate it by alleviating parental burdens through provision of a workspace and continual support of engaging activities which can be used as a bonding activity or diversion. Kids at Home highlights the importance of active play in child development and hopes to both empower children and enable parents facing challenges exacerbated by COVID-19.
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