When this project was handed off to me we had a very vague set of requirements. We knew that this tool would both need to educate mom about feeding her baby as well as keeping track of what she feeds her baby. The low fidelity flow map, created by the art director looked something like this:

 

(initial flow by Babycenter Art Director Amanda Wu)

We were going to have four sections:

• A quiz
• a guide on feeding and weight gain,
• an age by age feeding guide
• the solid food tracker.

Here’s what my interpretation was in slightly more fidelity:

 

After we showed this to product and engineering, we found out that the quiz, while valuable would require a ver complex set of logic components and we quickly discarded this format for something more simple.  The age by age feeding guide and “is your baby getting enough” both were content heavy and based off articles from the baby center site. The solid food tracker is where I plan to spend all my time talking through, as it required the most logic.

 

FAIL EARLY AND FAIL OFTEN?

 

We actually started off thinking about the food tracker portion all wrong. I’m not afraid to admit that because at the time, I hadn’t been informed that there in fact was a proper way to introduce solid foods to a baby.

Here’s what that flow for the third iteration (before we realized we were wrong).

Complicated right?!

What this shows is our (incorrect) assumptions that this tool was a daily food tracker. We thought that the goal was to feed your baby the same food over a period of time (somewhere around 3-5 days) to make sure that the baby didn’t have a bad reaction.
Our first concept gave mom the ability to not only see the overview of all her introduced foods in “list form” but also to give her the option to dive deeper and add more entries to the food. If she marked a food unsafe, we had prompts to inform her of next steps incase of a bad reaction.

TRY TRY AGAIN

We realized after feedback from experts that this model didn’t fit the actual suggested feeding method, which was to try a new food and wait 3 days before giving it to your baby again and then deciding whether or not it was safe or unsafe.
With this new insight, we simplified the flow and removed some of the negative reactions based off the knowledge that most moms have no trouble introducing new foods and most babies don’t develop strong reactions to new foods.

 

THE FINAL FLOW

 

This process was long and painful at times, only because there were so many point of views about the function of this tool. Everything from the verbiage of the tool to the function and even the iconography was scrutinized (as it should be) and re-thought.

What made this process painful was that a lot of this happened after the wireframes were believed to be approved, which meant all this tweaking was done high fidelity in comps.

REDLINES AND ASSETS

After the UI/UX was finally approved, I moved on quickly to the redlines or “specs” and generated all the assets for both IOS and Android.

THE FRUIT OF OUR LABOR

The tool is now launched along with it’s companion tool, the sleep tool (designed by my art director, Amanda Wu).

View the project on my portfolio.

 

Even though it took more effort to align on the core functionality of this tool, I am very proud of what we accomplished and look forward to making improvements.

 

VIEW THE WHOLE PROJECT