Project Brief
88 % of Taiwanese families are double-paid families. In this 8-month project, we focused on this major group and delved into the context with the aim to reduce the burden of parents of double-paid families.
Year
Nov 2018 - June 2019
Background
Trans Action Award 2019
Target
Double-paid familied with children aged 7-9
My role
Team
Project manager
Researcher
1 PM
2 User Researcher
2 Engineer
2 UI Designer
Challenge
Parents of double-paid families have to balance their work and family, so they tend to have less time for their children. Furthermore, urging children to complete various tasks not only occupies their time after work but also arises conflicts, which intensifies parents' mental burden and takes a turn for the worse parent-child relationships.
Final Proposal
A board game that enables children to develop self-management ability, along with a parent-only App for parents to check if their children accomplish their daily tasks. With our proposal, we aimed to reduce the time for parents that spent on supervising children to finish tasks by developing children's self-management skills, so that parents can spend time accompanying their children and enjoy a less compact schedule.
Achievement
This project won 3rd place at Trans Action Award 2019 from 200 contestants.
Design Approach
Research
In the project, we aimed to reduce the burden of parents from double-paid families.
To get a better understanding of the problems they have encountered, we interviewed 14 couples and 5 children from 7 double-paid families, finding the following pain points of parents.
01 Unequal distribution of housework
The distribution of housework and parenting job is unequal. The party with higher standards for housekeeping takes more burden.
02 No leisure time
These parents are busy on job, housework, and parenting without a breathing space.
03 Willing but unable to accompany children
These parents are concerned about accompanying their children but they lack time.
Persona
Based on the interviews, we created the persona of double-paid families.
Define
Digging into the problem, we found that parents of double-paid families usually have a mutually acceptable distribution model for housework. The biggest pain point is to raise children under a compact schedule, which leads to family unhappiness.
Key Finding
Because parents of double-paid families have to balance their work and family, they tend to have less time to spend with their children. Moreover, urging children to complete various tasks not only occupies their time after work but also causes conflicts, which increases parents' mental burden and worsens the parent-child relationships.
As a result, we want to reduce the time for parents that spent on supervising children to finish tasks by developing children's self-management skills, so that parents can spend time accompanying their children and enjoy a less compact schedule.
Prototype & Test
To validate our idea, we made various prototypes, gave these prototypes to double-paid families, and asked them to use it at home for 2 weeks. After 3 rounds of tests and iterations, we collected these key findings:
01 Concretize the concept of time
It is hard for children to understand the abstract time concept. We need to help children understand time through concrete display.
02 Avoid children using tablets
Parents are worried that their children will be addicted to tablets, so we use the physical board game to link the apps used by the parents.
03 Children should have the chance to arrange daily schedule
Children must be given the lead in scheduling before they can really learn. Therefore, children and parents should discuss the schedule together.
Final Proposal
We designed Time for Kid, a board game composed of Time Island and a parent-only app.
Through gamification, children are allowed to complete tasks on their own to develop their self-management ability.
Award
Time For Kid won 3rd place at 2019 TRANS-ACTION AWARD, a nine-month UX oriented design competition involving industry stakeholders, from 200 contestant teams.
Key Takeaways
-
Observing the users in the field and fully investigating the context is important, which will help us empathise with their situation. Although we didn't get a chance to really visit a family at their homes, but we should seek the opportunity to really go into the context in the future, which would enable us to find more possible intervention points.
-
Design is not a linear process; it is a complex matrix of criteria in the triad of people (desirability), business (viability) and technology (feasibility), with the sweet spot at its intersection. I realised that a designer should have more understanding about the technology to discover more approaches to solve the complex problem. From social enterprise to new business ventures, from social innovation to creating new service paradigms, a service designer will call on a wide range of technical, creative design and management skills.