BabyTracks: Better sleep for your baby. Better sleep for you.
BabyTracks Is Born
Like most new parents today, when our baby was born my wife and I used an app to track our baby’s every move: when he ate, how long he slept, and all the dirty diapers. We tracked this data primarily for our doctor, who wanted this data to help determine if our baby was staying hydrated and getting enough to eat, but it also gave my wife and I a shared reference point which helped us maintain what remained of our sanity in those addled first days of parenthood. But after we’d gotten through our first few checkups and received a healthy stamp of approval from our doc, my wife asked me “Why are we still doing this?”
She had a point. This data tracking had become such an integral part of our daily lives; I hadn’t stopped to think about how my meticulously logged noted about the the latest contents of our son’s underpants were going to help us in any way. What value remained? How could the falloff for a product be so steep? Could this be done better?
I wanted to find out, so I rounded up four parent couples between the ages of 30–36 with babies less than six-months-old to better understand their relationship with baby tracking apps, identify what data and features they care most about, and determine pain points that I could improve upon to differentiate my app.
The Cycle of Life
It was clear from my interviews that my experience was not unique. Three of the four couples had given up using their app within the first month. They had used the app to track feeding and diaper changes in the first two weeks of life, just as our doctor recommended, but in similar fashion soon lost interest thereafter.
“You’re spending all this time kind of hovering around this app. I’m not exactly sure where the return is.” said Chris, a 34-year-old corporate insurance salesman from Minnesota. He and his wife stopped using the app after three weeks. Caty, a 36-year-old veterinarian from Seattle, only lasted three days. “The costs vastly outweigh the benefits.”
The exception was one couple who who’s baby was slightly older than the rest of my subjects and growing out of the newborn anything-goes phase. This couple had switched to an app called Huckleberry, which specializes in sleep tracking and analysis with a premium feature, called SweetSpot, that analyzes a baby’s daily routine and provides suggested nap times. They hoped that with the app’s help, they could shape their son’s sleep habits and help them get more sleep in turn.
When it came to using these apps, interviewees mentioned a few quirks here or there with the workflow or organization and offered several recommendations for features that might be useful other users, but nothing that was compelling enough to change behavior. The pain points ran deeper:
- Apps lack long-term value: sharp fall off, do not evolve with child
- No motivation to change: Effort to great to switch to something easier/better, not enough positive tradeoff
- Phones: Intrusive, need to be handy, wary of screen presence around baby
- Sleep depravation: forgetful, error prone, limited capacity
- Unnecessary detail: too many options kills desire to use
- Reminders: difficult to recall what you’ve done and when, what’s next
Scoping Out the Competition
I looked at four apps as part of my competitive analysis and identified three elements for comparison: the home screen, trackers and analytics.
Home Screen: Clutter is the enemy of a good home screen. Apps that made good use of design elements like color, iconography, alignment and proximity were able to fit much more information, clearly, onto the screen. The home screen needs to provide reference to the user on current and past status. When done well, this can act as a schedule for parents and caretakers as it provides direction of what’s coming next and when.
Trackers: The workhorses of data-entry. Trackers need to enable live tracking as well as past-data entry. Multi-function buttons greatly condense and associate information on each tracker to reduce content on screen. Optional details work well buried behind a button, as they are not relevant to all users.
Analytics: A timeline is most necessary for analysis, as users usually live in the day. Visual elements improve comprehension at a glance.
These app’s mostly employed slight variations of the same functionality, but it was clear that Huckleberry’s SweetSpot feature was a big hit. I also gravitated towards LifeSum’s home page summary report as it used user goals to create visual progress in a meaningful way.
Designing in Baby Steps
The bread and butter of any tracking app are its trackers, so I streamlined the tracking workflow and begin drafting concepts.
After that, I conducted a peer review. It was clear something fundamental was missing. While I had cherry-picked some of the best features from my competitors, what was my app’s unique hook? Why would users choose it over all the others?
Meeting Users in the Moment
I’ve never used an Apple Watch, but one evening as I was putting my son to bed, standing in the dark with both hands occupied and no idea where my phone was, it clicked. A wearable like the Apple Watch addresses several user pain points I identified in my research:
- Convenient: Always with the user, won’t get misplaced
- Reinforces behavior: Always visible to the user, instant notifications
- Simpler interface: Restricted functionality require minimalist design
- Less intrusive: As a piece of jewelry, a watch arguably becomes part of the user’s person, rather than an external object of focus.
Only a handful of baby tracking apps exist for the Apple Watch, so I made the choice to pivot from a smartphone to a smart watch design for my prototype.
There’s Value in Sleep
To test the prototype I gathered three test subjects that fit my user profile: 30-something, affluent, first-time parents who are tech-savvy. My goal was to learn:
- How users move through the app?
- Are tools easily identifiable?
- Does my user flow work as intended?
- What information is missing?
My users praised the core functionality of tracking events. It was intuitive and easy to achieve. But as I led them through additional tasks these users got lost in the convoluted alarm system and questioned the usefulness of my analytics. Why not just create a phone app? I was still trying to do too much.
Reflecting back on my user journey, I knew that the long-term success of my app depended on providing long-term solutions. From the day a new child is born through age one and beyond, what do parents crave more than anything?
A good night’s sleep.
BabyTracks
BabyTracks is a specialized sleep-tracking app that takes a page out of Huckleberry’s playbook. It uses pediatrician-recommended wake windows to recommend nap times for your baby, and you can track it all in one simple interface with the push of a button.
