PARENTSPACE.

END-TO-END APPLICATION.

RESEARCH PLAN.

BACKGROUND

Although becoming a parent can bring plenty of joy and happiness in a person’s life, when one chooses to become a stay-at-home parent along may come stress, social isolation, feeling helpless or abandoned, and other negative “side-effects”.

A mobile app able to help stay-at-home parents to remain social and keep in touch with other people experiencing a similar life situation could bring more joy, positivity and fulfillment into stay-at-home parents’ lives.

PROBLEM

When a person becomes a stay-at-home parent, it might get difficult for them to stay in touch with their friends or lead the life they used to when they didn’t have a baby to constantly take care of. At some point, they may start to feel like they are not part of the society anymore, as they don’t go to work or attend any social events and have little to no time for a life of their own and things they used to enjoy when they had more free-time.

Being socially isolated and bearing a load of responsibility around the clock can undermine a person’s mental and emotional stability. That is why staying social, communicating and sharing experiences with other adults is crucial for stay-at-home parents.

RESEARCH GOALS

·         Find out if and in what ways a mobile application could help stay-at-home parents with their problems:

        - Run a competitive benchmark study on already existing apps for stay-at-home parents to get more insights about how mobile apps can help tackle the problem;

        - Get first-hand information that would help us understand what features and content of our future app could fulfill the social and other related needs of a stay-at-home parent.

RESEARCH OBJECTIVES

·         Gather data about what other similar apps have to offer and where they fail to provide solutions to stay-at-home parents’ problems;

·         Get information about what challenges stay-at-home parents face in their day-to-day life;

·         Get information about what could help stay-at-home parents feel more content with their life;

·         Find out how helpful and important an app like ours could be to a stay-at-home parent and what their expectations for it would be.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

·         Are there any apps exclusively for stay-at-home parents?

·         If so, in what ways do they help people?

·         If no, in what ways an app like that could help people?

·         What other kinds of apps for parents are out there? What do they have to offer? What are their strong and weak sides? Which of their features could be useful for a stay-at-home parents app?

·         In what ways does becoming a stay-at-home parent can change a person’s life? What are their daily challenges?

·         What could help stay-at-home parents feel more social and connected with society?

·         What would stay-at-home parents hope to find in an app designed for their needs?

METHODOLOGIES

·         Secondary Research – Competitive Analysis.

Gather information about other apps for parents similar to the product we are trying to create. Compare and analyze the strengths and weaknesses of our competitors. Learn from our competitor apps’ successes and failures

·         Secondary Research – Provisional Personas.

Gather data about different types of stay-at-home parents and their situations, pains and goals and create several provisional personas based on that.

·         Primary Research – User Interviews.

Interview a few stay-at-home parents and gather information about their needs, pains and frustrations our app could help them with. Ask insightful questions to understand the target user better. Find out what they would expect from an app like designed for their needs. Analyze the data gathered and define in what ways our app could help solve the user’s problems.

PARTICIPANTS

·         Any age, gender or nationality

·         Any income level

·         Any location

·         Stay-at-home parents

ASSUMPTIONS AND RISKS

·         Research might prove creation of the app unnecessary

·         Participants might expect from the app things we cannot offer them

TIMELINE

·         Run a benchmark study

·         Define user archetypes and create provisional personas based on them

·         Write a user interview script

·         Recruit participants

·         Interview participants and record the interviews

·         Document and summarize the user interview findings

·         Write a research debrief based on the findings from both secondary and primary research

·         Create a user persona based on all the data gathered