Empty Nest Syndrome refers to the grief that many parents feel when their children move out of home. This condition is common in individuals who identify with the role of primary carer for their children.
Empty Nest Syndrome sends ripples of loneliness and loss through households, leaving parents grappling with a void that no text or call can fill.
Our group conducted a total of 12 participants, all identifying as parents who have had children leave the home after spending 15+ years under parental custody. The reasons for children leaving home varied (e.g enrollment in college, military service).
From each interview, we coded important thoughts and pain points. We compiled each participant's codes into categories of an affinity diagram.
3 major themes we found are outlined below:
Focusing on these major findings, we created 3 user personas which represent people seeking renewed connections beyond digital interactions, aiming for balanced relationships while navigating transitions from caretaker roles to rediscovering fulfilling routines and identities.
Our team created a user flow diagram to incorporate the key features we wanted to see on Fledgeling's interface.
Keeping heavy emphasis on the insights described through the user personas, we wanted to maintain a balance between necessary information and overloaded distraction by being intentional with each frame. We also knew we wanted to have this design be accessible to our target age group, keeping consistent color contrast and easy usability throughout the app.
After much consideration, we decided that our app could aid users find new routines and discover self through various daily prompts. These prompts would originally be defined through the onboarding process, and updated as users make progress in their respective areas of concern.
During this process, we had many iterations and received feedback from both users and other designers to spark changes.
Wireframing was an essential part of our process because it allowed us to visually collaborate on our ideas and build off of each other's designs. By using Figma, we worked collaboratively in real time through both virtual and in-person meetings, creating many iterations. Here is an example of one of our iterations we decided to use as a baseline design for our product.
Feedback
Here are a few notable feedback points that were given to us while testing an early iteration of Fledgeling:
🐤 "The steps of the task are too wordy and are overwhelming when I press 'start task'."
🐤 "I'm not sure how long each task would take and how much time I should commit."
🐤 "I'm not sure how this task is helping my goals. Also, I have multiple goals so which one is it helping?"
🐤 "Why am I submitting the photo when I haven't started the task yet?"
Feedback
After incorporating feedback and further developing our designs, we conducted another usability test to receive feedback. Some important feedback points are outlined below:
🐤 "The background colors are inconsistent."
🐤 "The task duration slider is way too small for me to click with my fingers."
🐤 "I don't understand the point of filling in these circles."
Our team decided to create components in order to ensure consistency in our product. This made our designs much more efficient and easy to maintain. Our team decided on the name "Fledgeling", a stage of a bird's life cycle when they learn to live life independently, to follow the idea that parents are also leaving the nest and re-learning life as they experience empty nest syndrome. Following this name, we started to create designs that were both aesthetically appealing but also contained "bird-like" designs (nests, feathers, eggs). Our lighthearted twist was to use a chicken instead of an actual bird.
Fledgeling's onboarding stage is one of the most important processes for users, as it sets the tone for the users' overall experience with the app. While the app tailors to multiple different personas, the onboarding portion is when a user can clearly indicate the areas in which they'd like to seek personal improvement and identify the changes in parenthood that impact them the most, so they are able to address these problems and ultimately grow a stronger, renewed sense of identity.
On the homepage, Fledgeling curates a daily prompt for the user according to their responses in the onboarding survey. Tasks can range from creating habits to reflecting on personal identity but all ultimately serve as an outlet for users to grow in their personal goals. Upon completion, users can rate tasks to further influence the type of tasks they will see and continually update their personal goals.
Addressing our first persona's feelings of loneliness and desire to connect with others, users have the ability to see Fledgeling's impact on parents around the world. Not only is this an inspiration for parents to see that they are not alone in this process, but users can also see how their personal community of empty nester friends navigate daily life.
Users have the choice to view other responses to their personal daily task or see what tasks their friends had. For either option, they are able to react or leave an encouraging comment on any post!
During an iteration, our team discussed the possible methods of app retention and progress tracking in order for users to see long-term improvement and carry out our larger goals of helping users create renewed identities.
Our team found that, similarly to language-tracking apps like Duolingo, we wanted to incorporate a way for users to track their achievements corresponding to their personal growth goals. This allows users to have a visual measurement of progress they are making and understand that each each small step accumulates into greater overall improvement.
In order to have users celebrate milestones in each goal area, they can collect coins and raise chickens in their own "coop". This concept also encourages parents to still exercise their strengths of caregiving, showing that parenthood can still exist in their lives as they learn to prioritize their personal wellbeing.
Fledgeling's profile section mainly houses users' archives in a monthly view. This allows users to further view their progress on the app, by seeing each post they have created throughout the duration they have been using the app.
Considering that these albums are composed of both public and archived posts, the profile section is only visible for the user to view.
Overall, learned a lot about usability testing and iterative design. By having many times where we received feedback from other designers during work sessions and users of our target demographic, we were able to create designs that consistently aligned with our overall goals.
I am also very grateful to have been part of a team that was passionate about our problem statement. We all identify as college students who have parents who have invested heavily in our lives, so we felt passionately about providing a service to our parents that would benefit them in finding fulfillment as their experiences with parenthood change. Because we all felt passionately about this topic, we had very strong opinions of the way that this problem could be addressed according to our personas; by spending more time fleshing out our initial user flow, we were very confident in our later designs and could place full emphasis on usability improvements.
One of the aspects I found most helpful during this project was creating components and sticking to a grid system. This aided in our process of creating a design identity and style guide to use in our final versions of the product.
Something I can improve on for future projects is keeping track of the evolution of designs we made during our iterative design. Our inability to keep consistent track of this made it challenging to identify when and how design changes were made. The lack of visibility made it difficult to learn from past iterations or measure the impact of design changes over the duration of the project.
In the future, it will be much easier to compare different design versions by manually duplicating each design file at each stage of testing or feedback in order to easily reference them.
In the future, I plan to implement more frames regarding the customization aspect of the chicken coop and settings portion of the profile. Using my skills with 3-D art, I would like to make the design of each chicken 3-dimensional. After presenting this project to our class, we were voted to be the best project and received extra credit. We plan to continue making improvements to this project and apply for the CHI design challenge in January.
