Understanding the Journey of Single Working Dad

Project at Glance

• Length: 2 weeks
• Methods: Semi-structured interviews with single fathers, Content Analysis of Online Forum Posts, Persona, User Journey
• Tool: Sketch
• Role: Independent project (I led all phases of the research and design process)
  

Background

There are many challenges working single dads confront, ragged to succeed both in career and family. Single dad needs to balance their work and parenting responsibilites. What challenges do they face in their parenting experience?

Goal

The goal of this project is to understand the challenging journey of single dads who often needs to effectively balance their work and life as a parent.

To get an idea of what experience to design for, I interviewed ten single working dads and analyzed comments and posts from a single dads forum. I also created a user persona and journey map to better empathize with the challenges they face in their life.

Identifying User Needs

After talking to people in the potential target population, I discovered many interesting findings that can be translated into design insights. I summarized these findings below.

• Rather than spending quality time with children, more time was unncessarily spent with grocery shopping, house cleaning
• It is hard to focus on both parenting and working
• Don't have enough time to take care of myself

Persona

I gathered and synthesized data from the interview and online forum posts and clustered the notes via an affinity diagramming activity. The analysis served as guidance to construct a persona, which is a fictional representation of a potential type of user that drives the product design. A typical persona includes a short profile description of the user, their goals, key characteristic attributes, and demographic characteristics such as internet usage.

User Persona

User Journey

In addition to the persona, I also created a user journey map that best reflects the persona's activities and level of affective experience in relation to the respective time of day and goals.

User Journey Map

Ideation & Prototype

I started prototying ideas inspired by interviewees. Single dads have difficulty managing time between spending time with children and also doing housechores. To mitigate this problem, I made prototype named superkiddos. Single dads can make a family account and utilize this application for his children to have more responsibility in helping house chores and be rewarded. That way, single dads can reduce the stress of housechores and manage the housechore more organized and effectively.

Parent View

Child View

Project Reflections

This project started as I was chatting with my friend. My friend is a single working dad and shared how difficult and challenging it is to work while being a great dad. He was also stressed over the heavy dishes and house chores after work. After listening to his complaints, I wanted to develop a solution to help him, which eventually led me to work on this project.

Through this project, I learned about prototyping techniques and developed familiarity with new prototyping tools such as Sketch. I hope to learn more how to design a mobile app such as experimenting with different layouts, applying multiple color schemes, and developing a style guide to better collaborate with UI engineers in the future.