Huddle
Design Research | UX DESIGN | Branding
New parents need support, not stuff. Huddle is a service designed to shift practices surrounding the birth of a new baby, starting with the baby shower. Huddle's multi-channel platform, comprised of an app, website, and toolkit, helps new parents get the support they need, instead of a mound of stuff they don't. This concept is deeply grounded in user research and was developed over eight weeks in a team of three.
ROLE
DESIGN RESEARCH & STRATEGY
UX DESIGN
Babies are expensive, and they come with a lot of stuff
New families spend an average of $12,000 and up to $30,000 on baby gear in the first year of life, and that number is repeated and increased every year thereafter. Everything from cribs to rocking chairs, to Mr. Boppys and Sophie dolls, to bottle warmers to diapers are included on the growing list of items required for a new baby. Yet in hindsight, many parents complain that they bought too many items, used expensive items only once or twice, or their baby’s preferences didn’t align with particular products.
and it all starts with
the baby shower.
You have to create a registry, and then figure out what needs to be on that registry, which leads to a black hole of research and contradictory recommendations, followed by building anxiety of "do we have enough?" and "do we even have the right things!?"
On top of that, everyone hates baby showers: the cheesy games, the forced fun, the gendered-ness. But, they keep happening because baby showers are an important ritual for a community to demonstrate their support for new parents.
That's why we created Huddle, a service to help new parents and their community shift practices around having a new baby,
starting with the baby shower.
How it works
1. Create a Huddle Registry
A Huddle registry isn’t a list of stuff, its a place to ask for the support you’ll need as a new family - babysitting hours, meals, dog walking, errand running and beyond.
2. Personalize your Huddle theme
Everyone has different styles, so customize the elements of your Huddle party to suit your preferences. Choose from our curated themes or create your very own.
3. Receive your Huddle Toolkit
Your Huddle Toolkit includes everything you need to setup your Huddle experience - a Pledge Poster, personalized Pledge Stickers for each guest, advice cards, and a keepsake book.
4. Gather pledges of support
Host your Huddle, where guests will use their personalized stickers to make pledges of support. After the party, pledges will be automatically synced to the Huddle App.
5. Get Support from your community
Use the Huddle app to coordinate and schedule your pledges and keep your community informed and engaged in your new family's life.
The web experience
The Huddle website onboards new users into the Huddle experience. New users can learn how it works, pick a theme for their Huddle, invite their community, and, most importantly, create a Huddle Registry.
The Huddle registry is the cornerstone of the Huddle experience.
A Huddle registry is different than a traditional registry. Instead of gifts, a Huddle registry enables new parents to ask for ‘acts of service’ from their friends and family as they adjust to life with a new baby.
The Huddle Toolkit
The toolkit provides users with the items they need to facilitate a Huddle. The standard Huddle toolkit contains four items: invitations, a Pledge Poster, personalized sticker cards for each guest, and Advice Cards with a Keepsake Book.
Each of the toolkit components are designed modularly, so that they can easily be configured to a user's selected theme.
What makes a Huddle different from a traditional baby shower is the activity facilitated around the Huddle Poster, where guests pledge acts of service for the new parents using their personalized Pledge Stickers. The Huddle Poster is customized to display the registry categories requested by the new parents and guests place their stickers in the registry category boxes where they would like to help.
The poster system can accommodate anything from 2-12 registry categories. A light grid is printed inside each registry category box in order to help organize guest stickers. The size of the grid (and corresponding guest stickers) are scaled based on the number of guests attending the Huddle.
At the conclusion of the event, the pledges are recorded and stored through the Huddle app.
The Huddle App
The Huddle app is the quarterback of the Huddle system. It is the hub for organizing and scheduling guest pledges and keeps everyone informed and engaged in the weeks and months after a Huddle party.
The Huddle app parses names and pledges from the Huddle poster and populates the My Pledges section for parents and guests. Parents can then view their bank of remaining pledges and easily manage the schedule for meals, chores, and other registry items in the Calendar. Guests can check out the Registry items at any time and sign up for open time slots in the Calendar.
The app's feed is designed to be an emotional hook for a Huddle group to stay engaged with the new family over time. Like many news feeds, parents can post pictures on the feed and friends and family can interact by liking and commenting on pictures. Additionally, action prompts are embedded throughout the feed to remind guests to fulfill their pledges.
Design process
This business concept was developed as part of an Interaction Design Studio at Carnegie Mellon School of Design. My team was tasked with designing a multi-channel product ecosystem that extended beyond the screen. The following design process took place over 8 weeks in the spring of 2018:
Problem definition
Exploratory research
Synthesis
Concept development
Refine
& build
Problem definition - baby gear
Babies are expensive, and the come with a lot of stuff.
Parents ultimately want to do the right thing for their children, but finding the “correct” items is difficult. Furthermore, babies grow fast, so certain items may only be relevant during a certain development stage, only to become obsolete within a few days, weeks or months as the baby grows. These items must then be discarded, stored, donated, or resold, adding additional burden to a new parent’s everyday life and household logistics.
While sustainable and multi-use baby items are gaining some traction, a tremendous gap still exists between sustainable, stress-free baby items and the current expensive and wasteful paradigm. Even in the world of Amazon reviews and countless mommy blogs, new parents are often still overwhelmed by figuring out what items are necessary, optional, or just nice-to-have for their new babies.
With this in mind, we asked ourselves:
HOW MIGHT WE...
Make planning for and accessing baby gear easier, less expensive, and less wasteful?
Connect new parents to better information and support decision-making on baby-related purchases?
Foster a sense of community for new parents and enable sharing and collaborative consumption?
Exploratory research
To help focus our initial research phase and scope possible points for intervention, we began by mapping the territory through secondary research, web eavesdropping popular parenting websites, social networks, and forums, and researching analogous services such as Finnish baby boxes, UK NCT, Barkbox, Trunk Club, StitchFix, Rent the Runway and Shyp.
Through this process, it became clear that understanding the practices that define acquiring gear for a new baby was key to understanding how to frame our research. Using the lens of practices, we noticed that there were four main interrelated and overlapping practices within our territory, and used this framework to guide the questions in our exploratory research going forward. This included a variety of generative research methods:
10
interviews
95
respondents to an online survey
1
retail observation session
∞
web eavesdropping
Synthesis
Using the transcripts and observations from our interviews, contextual inquiries, web eavesdropping and online survey we created an affinity diagram. One of the things we noticed was that, even though we did not ask about it explicitly, everyone brought up baby showers, and oftentimes with very strong opinions attached.
After much discussion and iteration, we developed the below framework to summarize our research findings and lay the foundation on which we could start designing.
Design principles
Grounded in our research findings, we developed four core design principles to guide the next phase of our process:
Just when you need it
Access over ownership
Stand on the shoulders of sharing
Bridges communities
Concept development
We used our design principles to generate inspiration and iterate widely on concept development. Together we narrowed in on seven concepts ranging from a baby subscription box (a la BarkBox) to an in-home baby consultant network to evaluate with our research participants.
Evaluating the concepts
We evaluated our concepts with five research participants using a concept "speed-dating" style. We presented all seven concepts with a brief description and then asked participants to rank the top three concepts they would be most likely to use. We then asked them to talk through the benefits and any challenges they would foresee in their top three choices.
We had expected that one concept would emerge as a winner, but our participants were all over the map on their preferences. Interestingly, one participant that was deeply integrated into their faith community noted that they could imagine the baby shower and used gear concepts being very useful to some one outside of her community, but that they would be irrelevant for her because her faith community already played those roles.
Based on this feedback we initially attempted to solve all of our users the pain points and sketched out an idea for a service that combined a box subscription service, a rental service for big ticket items like strollers and baby carriers, a gift registry that would accommodate used items, and also a toolkit for having a supportive baby shower.
However, we quickly realized that cherry-picking elements from each concept diluted the core ideas and, cobbled together, lacked a clear and cohesive purpose. We needed to cut back and reframe our approach. After much white board sketching, conversation, and revisiting our design principles, we uncovered our core insight.
Key Insight
Many of the pain points we uncovered during our research began and cascaded out from the baby shower. Not to mention, almost every parent we had spoken to had (unsolicitedly) mentioned their dislike of showers. They did not like attending them or being the recipient of one. Regardless, parents-to-be often felt obligated to have one (or more) because a relative or friend wanted to "help" or show support for the new family.
However, it was often a meaningful milestone for grandparents-to-be and can be an important social right of passage for them. Once the parents-to-be agreed to have a shower, the decision-making involved in setting up a registry opened the floodgates of research, overwhelm, and an endless list of baby gear possibilities.
It all starts
with the
baby shower
Shift practices at the root of the system
This social practice of showing support for a new family by giving gifts leaves parents with a mound of stuff they don't want, but without the things they really need when having a new baby: to feel supported, to have people to turn to for personal advice, to maintain sanity.
By re-imagining what a baby shower could be, we had the opportunity to shift practices at the root of the system. A new type of baby shower could help transition priorities away from gifts to acts of service and hopefully have cascading impacts on how families and friends support new parents on a larger scale. Though this concept was far away from our initial hunches and early ideation, it aligned perfectly with the design principles we had developed through our research.
Refining the concept & brand
Once we had the concept solidified, we prototyped each touch point within the system and developed them through multiple levels of fidelity and feedback. Each asset, including the physical toolkit, was eventually produced to a finished quality.
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We spent a lot of deliberating and iterating on our brand identity and name. We wanted the brand to feel approachable and friendly to audiences of different generations and genders, but not overly cute or in your face. The core of our service is about gathering support for a new family, so we wanted the brand to communicate the idea of coming together and building/reinforcing community.
We eventually landed on the visual metaphor of an umbrella because it evokes“rain” and “shower”, but also “coverage” and “protection," and is also a nod to a traditional baby shower. It is our hope that by staying grounded in familiar visual cues surrounding a baby shower, people would be more open to trying a new concept from a place of comfort. The hand-drawn lettering was used to provide warm and not overly tech-y feel, so that the brand felt approachable for all age ranges, from new parents to grandparents.
