A better chatbot for new parents who can't afford to make a mistake.
New parents are afraid of messing up. Search engines and chatbots currently available couldn't give users fast, high quality, and credible answers they needed to make decisions.
User research began with surveys through Reddit and Mechanical Turk, then with user interviews from a screener. After speaking to four parents over the phone, three quotes kept coming back to me:
"Intentions are half the battle"
"I sometimes spend five hours searching for a solution online"
"You don't always know if [the answers] are real"
I listened to what was missing from a quality and cost angle while hearing about frustrations with their current parenting support tools such as:
Online:
Offline:
A common pain point was finding credible and relatable information. This was the most actionable feedback I received and decided that I could contribute to the field of reducing parenting stress by making a chatbot trained with public access resources primarily from government departments to provide credible solutions to parents who struggled to find answers they were looking at a time they couldn't reach out to a trusted member of their community.
I made three iterations of a website which integrated the chatbot, conducting three rounds of testing altogether. The platforms used were:
There were 44 users engaged with this project, ultimately suggesting a $100/yr price point for a subscription-based app with the chatbot and a journal component.
Recently, I decided to make another version of the site that would be more equitable to access. Free of cost and intended to generate revenue through ads and affiliate links, the new Figma designs would center the chatbot and would more transparently show which sources the chatbot was educated with (a key pain point in previous iterations).
The total tools explored in this project were:
After another round of testing, I plan to implement the new designs in a Webflow site.
A more in-depth look at the project:
