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Where single parents support other single parents
Video Overview
Project Details
Client
The Villiage
Client description
An early-stage startup, creating an app for: single parents to support other single parents
Team
Collaborated with a project manager and a UX designer
My Role
Lead Strategist, UX Researcher, and UX Designer
Timeline
3 Months
Methods
secondary desk research, competitive analysis, interviews, questionnaire (survey), Affinity clustering, ideation and prioritization, Fake press release (vision), value proposition canvas
Deliverables
research plan, persona, research report, research presentation, “press release”, value proposition canvas, user task flows, UX audit, wireframes, wireflows, prototypes, UI and branding designs
Context
Why focus on Single parents as a target user
There are 18.6 million single-parent households in the United States. This large subset of the US population that has substantial challenges that are distinct and unique from a coupled hosehold. Solutions for their problems would hopefully have a high amount of reach and impact on society.
Single parents are an interesting, challenging, and rewarding group to design precisely for; they have many limiting constraints - much more than the average person while taking on more responsibility for more people - juggling They need to function at extremely high levels of performance in many distinct areas of life concurrently. Many have turned to technology to help them live a more balanced, fulfilling, successful, and enjoyable life, but have found many mainstream solutions lacking, and are in need for something better.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY (TLDR)
The Ask
Discover the needs, challenges, and problems single parents have in order to uncover opportunities to help them.
Come up with multiple solutions so we can determine which are the strongest
Opportunity
There is very little competition in the US
Single parents apps only address 2 of the 14 most common issues single parents face in their day-to-day lives. That leaves 12 issues that are drastically underserved.Online Support groups don’t cater specifically to single parents
The number one way in which single parents find peer support is in Facebook groups, but those groups are general purpose and were not designed for single parents in mind. They lack features and functionality tailored specifically to single parents.
Goals
Business Goals
Identify areas/aspects of the single parent’s experience that reveal opportunities to support single parents better than with current offerings
Validate promising concepts that are highly desirable and invalidate weaker candidates
Develop a problem-solution fit
Research Goals
Discover the needs, challenges, and problems single parents have in order to uncover opportunities to help them.
Key questions
What are the most challenging aspects of being a single parent? What specifically makes single-parent life difficult?
How do single parents find support and who do they go to when assistance is needed?
What hurdles and/or constraints do single parents face when growing and maintaining their support network?
What hurdles and/or constraints do single parents face when making and maintaining friendships?
Process and Approach
Secondary (Desk) Research
I am not a parent, let alone a single parent - so I needed to ramp up my knowledge about this target audience and market as quickly as possible to gain empathy and with a "beginner's mind" try to approach exploratory (generative) research to uncover user needs that others might take for granted or ignore.
Competitive Analysis
Single parents need a lot of help, and they are already seeking it out online to augment their support networks. I wanted to find out the advantages and disadvantages of the various approaches that single parents were already using in order to uncover areas in the market that were underserved and the ways they missed the mark. This knowledge would help us identify areas of potential differentiation and with less competition.
Interviews and Questionnaire (Survey)
With the knowledge gained from the previous research, the time had come to "get out of the office and into the real world" and connect with single parents directly. We wanted to dig deeper into the main 13 issues single parents struggle with and determine which issues are most pressing and noteworthy. This step of the research would help us focus on the main pain points, prioritizing where we could have the biggest impact.
Ideation and Prioritization
With all the newly acquired knowledge and empathy gained from our research, we moved into the "solution space" - generating new ideas and concepts. At this point, our team benefited most from unstructured brainstorming. When it came to choosing the best ideas/concepts we leveraged a product strategy framework popularized by the company Intercom. This framework addressed our team's main concerns about being objective while not overthinking things too much. We were able to reach a confident consensus on the design direction with this approach.
Press Release Vision
This step in the project was the least conventional. We needed a "learning MVP" - building the smallest thing possible to assess if our solutions were on the right track and resonated with single parents. At first, we started with wireframes in order to get feedback, but we quickly realized even that was too slow and required too much effort at this point. After some consideration, we decided to use a product management technique (popularized by Amazon) that allowed us to get feedback on our ideas using only words! Since no design was necessary, we could iterate faster and with greater flexibility.
Minimum Viable Product and Minimum Loveable Product
The time came to be ruthless, cutting features we "could have" so we could focus on the functionality of "must haves" and "should haves". This step was challenging for our team because an MVP might not be enough to convince single parents to switch from their current solutions. This is why we decided to extend slightly beyond an MVP to a "minimum loveable product" (MLP). Balancing product size and complexity with what is new and compelling led to a lot of debate. Through iterative discussions, we chose the smallest possible feature set to bring something new and improved to single parents.
Value Proposition Canvas
Once we decided on a final feature set from the previous step, we decided to "check our work", and add some context and user feedback into our decisions made thus far. Our team took the features and redefined them as "pain relievers" and "gain creators" to see if they resonated with single parents. By showing single parents these features on a "value proposition canvas" we were able to quickly tweak our approach, modifying and removing functionality even further - getting to the essence and core of the product offering.
Solution
Overview
Parallel Parents is an app created exclusively for single parents to provide advice and support so they can thrive raising children without a partner.
It’s a specialized mini-social network designed to make single parents' lives easier.
What Makes Parallel Parents Unique (main features)
Meet the kinds of parents you’d like to talk to: All parent profiles are searchable and are categorized by their distance from each other, their age, their gender, and their children’s age and gender too.
Form deeper connections: the ability to easily meet other single parents who have things in common, in ways that are unique to those parenting on their own. Attributes such as a child's age, the reason for becoming a single parent, and co-parenting style/schedule arrangement for instance, allow for more specific kinds of connections than mainstream social media solutions allow for
Quickly find the top advice in your network: unlike traditional social media, which forces users to hunt for advice and support in multiple, fragmented, mutually exclusive groups, you can find all the support, advice, and resources in your community in one spot - the feed, which users can filter, sort, and customize how they see their support network, at a level of specificity not supported elsewhere. All advice and support is also categorized (tagged), allowing users to find just what they need, in the haystack of posts. This reduces the trial and error needed with current solutions.
Results
High Desirability: Single parents responded very positively to the press release and value proposition canvas, showing high interest, indicating that they would be likely to try Parallel Parents and believed it would likely help them in their lives better than current offerings.
Reducing Risk: Iterating on the press release and value proposition canvas (see below in the process section) means there is a lot of validated learning that has occurred before moving to more time and labor-intensive stages of the project, such as wireframes and prototypes. This reduces risk earlier on in the project and instills confidence in the team that we are moving in the right direction.
APPROACH AND PROCESS (IN DETAIL)
Secondary (Desk) Research
I am not a parent, let alone a single parent - so I needed to ramp up my knowledge about this target audience and market as quickly as possible to gain empathy and with a "beginners mind" try to approach exploratory (generative) research to uncover user needs that others might take for granted or ignore.
What was done
After reading academic papers, blog posts, and posts in single parent support groups, as well as watching a variety of videos posted by single parents, I discovered the main topics that matter most to single parents.
Findings
There are 13 main issues that single parents deal with - these would be the topics that Parallel Parents would initially support: Co-parenting, conflict between the parents, dating, extended family issues, finances, friends and companionship, guilt and judgment of others, legal issues, loneliness and isolation, raising children, self-esteem, stress and anxiety, time management, and visitation and custody.
These are the 13 key issues listed above are the main topics of interest, and often topics of distress for single parents. Any future solution would need to be flexible enough to address all of these key issues.
Transition to the next step: Solidifying the concrete issues that single parents struggle with most helped set the vision for what a new single parents product offering could accomplish - it was clear that competition wasn't touching most of these issues, so there was a huge market opportunity!
Competitive Analysis
Single parents need a lot of help, and they are already seeking it out online to augment their support networks. I wanted to find out the advantages and disadvantages of the various approaches that single parents were already using in order to uncover areas in the market that were underserved and the ways they missed the mark. This knowledge would help us identify areas of potential differentiation and with less competition.
What was done
To determine how single parents' needs are currently being served (or underserved), I compared: 15 Facebook groups, 4 Reddit subreddits, 4 forums, and 19 Single parent apps
Findings
The single parent market is underserved
Single parent focused Apps only address 2 of the 14 common issues identified in secondary research (see above) - this an opportunity to serve those needs that were neglected
Though most single parents use Facebook groups, there are inherent weaknesses and drawbacks to using social media, such as:
Size
For larger groups, their feeds can be a firehose, with dozens of posts a day, which can be hard to keep up with, let alone find relevant - there is no way to narrow down or filter for just what matters to you.
For smaller groups, there may not be many parents you resonate with, and often only a few members who are actively participating and engaging with the group
No matter what groups you belong to
you must jump between multiple groups to see new activity across them all - this is known as fragmentation, which makes it difficult to see activity among all groups that a user belongs to
finding parents who have children of a similar age is almost impossible
Because these groups exist on popular, general-purpose social networks like Facebook activity outside the single-parent group (other feeds and notifications) is distracting while accessing the support group
By Far the most popular way for single parents to find support online is in a Facebook Group. These general-purpose groups were not made with single parents in mind and have inherent drawbacks as mentioned in the red boxes above.
Transition to the next step: The competitive analysis showcased the strengths and weaknesses of the competition, which informed what to double down on and what to avoid.
Interviews and
Questionnaire (Survey)
With the knowledge gained from the previous research, the time had come to "get out of the office and into the real world" and connect with single parents directly. We wanted to dig deeper into the main 13 issues single parents struggle with and determine which issues are most pressing and noteworthy. This step of the research would help us focus on the main pain points, prioritizing where we could have the biggest impact.
What was done
Interviews - 10 people
Questionnaire - 82 responses
Insights from the interviews
Single parents have little to no time for themselves, let alone other people.
Single parents are doing so much on their own, they have extremely limited time for themselves, let alone other people. They have less time than most people and thus management becomes critical, especially when syncing their schedules with their children and possibly a co-parent.
Other single parents provide better advice and support than other people do.
Seeking out other single parents becomes important because they “just get it” and understand what being a single parent entails. Other parents and couples just don’t understand the ramifications of doing everything alone.
Parenting alone is isolating (going solo)
Single parents often feel isolated and alone, even though they are not lonely - they do have friends and family but decisions, but outcomes rest on their shoulders.
It's advantageous to connect with parents who have children of similar ages.
Single parents would also like to meet and socialize with other single parents who have children of roughly the same age because they are going through similar stages in life and have more in common
Findings from Questionnaire (survey)
64% have experienced loneliness and/or isolation since becoming a single parent at least some of the time
48% thought it was important or very important to have friends and/or people in their support network who are also single parents
42% were not satisfied or only somewhat satisfied with their support network
How did this contribute to/inform the next step?
Verified facts and findings from secondary research with my own results in primary research
Identified themes in primary research that overlap with themes in the secondary research, which strengthens the case that these topics are of upmost importance for single parents.
Gained confidence on what topics were most important to single parents and what issues were most critically in need of support.
The four main insights from the interviews mirrored the findings from the secondary research and was echoed in the questionnaire (survey).
Research Presentation
Transition to the next step: The interviews illuminated what single parents craved, and what bothered them, and further clarified their constraints. The most impactful insight is that it's advantageous to connect with parents who have children of similar ages.
Ideation and Prioritization
With all the newly acquired knowledge and empathy gained from our research, we moved into the "solution space" - generating new ideas and concepts. At this point, our team benefited most from unstructured brainstorming. When it came to choosing the best ideas/concepts we leveraged a product strategy framework popularized by the company Intercom. This framework addressed our team's main concerns about being objective while not overthinking things too much. We were able to reach a confident consensus on the design direction with this approach.
What was done
Generated 12 distinct concepts for features and functionality that would serve as solutions to single parents’ problems and represent where this project could possibly go next. I narrowed down the pool of ideas to just two of the most compelling ones.
Generated team consensus by voting on the best ideas which are most likely to be successful and generate meaningful change for single parents
How it was done
I conducted freeform ideation (brainstorming), capturing all my ideas in words on paper. Each idea was given a title, tagline, and overview.
To narrow down my ideas and choose which to move forward with, I used a prioritization framework called “RICE”, which helped me minimize personal biases in decision-making and help me defend my priorities to stakeholders
I ranked each idea in 3 categories: reach, impact, and confidence, each on a 5-point scale.
This modified RICE scoring model is a prioritization framework designed by Intercom to help product managers determine which products, features, and other initiatives to put on their roadmaps by scoring these items according to four factors. These factors, which form the acronym RICE, are reach, impact, confidence, and effort.
I removed execution (E), since I was not working with engineers whose expertise would be needed to collaboratively estimate how difficult and/or costly it would be to implement various ideas at a technical level.
I made scoring each idea easier by having them all estimated on a 0 to 5 scale and not weighting any one variable and making the equation simple addition without division
Results
2 ideas were clear winners
Needle in a haystack: Tame the feed (15/15)
This idea allows single parents to narrow down their feed to just what matters by filtering for topics, keywords, and other attributes of the parents who created those posts
Dual Profile: Parent and Children - together, united as one (14/15)
This idea allows single parents to look at the profiles of both parents and children so they can see the complete picture of a family unit and connect with other parents who have children who are similar
The two highest-scoring ideas were combined into the winning concept going forward.
Transition to the next step: Our team was excited by many of the ideas we generated. To avoid confirmation bias, we voted on each idea on multiple facets. This was a more objective approach, and by voting anonymously we avoided group think and negatively influencing one another.
Press Release Vision
This step in the project was the least conventional. We needed a "learning MVP" - building the smallest thing possible to assess if our solutions were on the right track and resonated with single parents. At first, we started with wireframes in order to get feedback, but we quickly realized even that was too slow and required too much effort at this point. After some consideration, we decided to use a product management technique (popularized by Amazon) that allowed us to get feedback on our ideas using only words! Since no design was necessary, we could iterate faster and with greater flexibility.
What was done
I had a clear, north-star vision of what the solution could be. The next challenge would be to articulate that vision clearly so that I can share it and get feedback on the big-picture direction (the features and benefits provided) before going into detailed designs to make sure we were on the right track.
The most effective way to convey this vision was to write a fake “press release” that described, in detail, what Parallel parents could do for parents.
Why it was done
A press release as a litmus test to get early feedback on the direction of a project has been popularized by Amazon’s product managers and has proven to be successful in validating ideas earlier on in the design process
Iterating on a press release is a lot less expensive than iterating on the product itself is also quicker than designing something else first.
Findings
There seemed to be high interest in trying out this solution
All single parents need support sometimes, not necessarily advice - so focusing on the wording and concepts related to support are more inclusive and needed more often
The fake press release painted a vivid picture of the Parallel Parents vision in words and allowed our team to get rapid feedback earlier in the process than sketches or wireframes.
Transition to the next step: By "prototyping with words" we were able to iterate quickly and cheaply, resulting in a much more refined idea in our sprints.
Minimum Viable Product and Minimum Loveable Product
The time came to be ruthless, cutting features we "could have" so we could focus on the functionality of "must haves" and "should haves". This step was challenging for our team because an MVP might not be enough to convince single parents to switch from their current solutions. This is why we decided to extend slightly beyond an MVP to a "minimum loveable product" (MLP). Balancing product size and complexity with what is new and compelling led to a lot of debate. Through iterative discussions, we chose the smallest possible feature set to bring something new and improved to single parents.
What was done
Broke down the high-level vision from the press release into a clearly defined set of features in order to scope of functionality.
Findings
If only “must have” features were included, it would be a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), but few would migrate from Facebook groups to such a simple program.
I knew I needed to add some “should have” features to make the concept appealing enough to try - known as a Minimum Lovable Product (MLP)
MVP features are in green (left), MLP features are in yellow (middle), and “could haves” are in red (right) for possible future versions. For the first version of Parallel Parents, we chose to go with both the green and yellow features to create a “Minimum Loveable Product”
Transition to the next step: Having a core set of features followed by secondary and tertiary prioritized features ensured that the team only built what was necessary to accomplish our goals at every step.
Value Proposition Canvas
Once we decided on a final feature set from the previous step, we decided to "check our work", and add some context and user feedback into our decisions made thus far. Our team took the features and redefined them as "pain relievers" and "gain creators" to see if they resonated with single parents. By showing single parents these features on a "value proposition canvas" we were able to quickly tweak our approach, modifying and removing functionality even further - getting to the essence and core of the product offering.
What was done
In order to double-check to see whether the Minimum Lovable Product (MLP) hit the mark, and landed a successful problem-solution fit, I took the MVP and MLP and broke it down into it’s component parts, and put them into a format that would make it easier to test the various parts of our solution.
Why it was done
Quickly and effectively design and test how value is created for customers
Helps you make sure that a product or service is positioned around customers’ values and needs.
Results
We Achieved problem-solution fit by creating connections between pains to pain relievers, as well as gains to gain creators and iterating on the canvas over time
Finings
Pain relievers mapped to pain points
Gain creators mapped well to gains
Many of the jobs to be done were provided by the product offerings
How this contributed to/informed the next step?
The value proposition served as a form of validation of problem-solution fit and as a milestone for progress
The value proposition canvas served as a validation check for the Parallel Parent’s concept, in order to make sure there was a match between pains and pain-relievers, as well as a match between gains and gain-creators.
Transition to the next step: The value proposition canvas served as a way to double-check our work and make sure our product prototypes produced tangible value aligned with single parent's pain points and needs.
Prototype Demo
CONCLUSION
Challenges
Single parents are extremely busy and thus are difficult to recruit and once recruited establishing secondary interactions
Results
Positive feedback: 92% of single parents responded very positively to the press release and value proposition canvas, showing high interest, indicating that they would be likely to try Parallel Parents and believed it would likely help them in their lives better than current offerings.
Reducing Risk: Iterating on the press release and value proposition canvas means there is a lot of validated learning that has occurred before moving to more time and labor-intensive stages of the project, such as wireframes and prototypes. This reduces risk earlier on in the project and instills confidence in the team that we are moving in the right direction.
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