Mom-day: Productivity Rewards App for Stay-at-home moms
Momday is a support system for Stay-at-home moms. Let’s make your me-time and take care of yourself first without guilt anymore.
Category
UX Case Study,
Mobile Design, Capstone Project
Method & Tools
User Survey, Persona, User Journey Map, User Testing, Sketch
Role
Project Owner
UX Researcher
UI Designer
Timeline
Jan - April, 2020
(12weeks)
Project Background
SAHM(Stay-at-home mom)’s labour, which is unpaid and invisible, is crucial to the everyday functioning of all households and also the society, but this 24/7 job tends to be undervalued and taken for granted by most. And it leads to the lack of social support system.
The mission of the project is to bolster the self-esteem and quality of life of SAHMs by letting family and society aware of their real labour value and supporting the substantial right they deserve.
Design Process
Empathize – Define – Ideate – Prototype – Test
Empathize
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User Research
SAHM feels more depressed than those who work outside.
Stay-at-home moms are worse off than employed moms and employed women in terms of sadness, anger, and depression, while they are less smiled, learned something interesting, and experienced happiness (Gallup, 2012). As we know, housework is unpaid and invisible work, and it leads to a lack of appreciation and a missing sense of accomplishment. Emotional struggles from that are likely contributing to their lower life ratings.
Did you recognize the annual labor value of SAHM is $96,000?
But, do you know the annual labor value of a stay-at-home mom is over $96,000 and work over 90 hours per week? The value of them is estimated at 26% of GDP in the United States 2018. Even if it is much deserved, this 24/7 job is socially undervalued, and this effort and time tend to be disregarded and taken for granted. Also, SAHMs can’t even get any clue what they were doing all day even if they had been so busy day with those hybrid roles.
Who does care about SAHM's work-life balance?
Legally, the limit of the working hour is eight a day and max 48 hours a week. However, a SAHM is not included in this legal protection list because of the reason why their labor is invisible and unpaid, even if they work over 90 hours a week. “Daily rest: the 11-hour rule” also does not apply to SAHMs. Society doesn’t care about their work-cycle. There is a consensus that workers need to limit working hours in order to balance their lives, but SAHMs do not have such a consensus. After all, the fact that SAHMs’ labor is not priced economically leads to the lack of social support.
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User Persona
Persona #1
Persona #2
Persona #3
Persona #1
Define
/ Problem Statement
SAHMs are not recognized for their contributions to the silent economy, and this contributes to not only declining self-esteem and motivation but also discouraging the need for their work-life balance in family and society. It is because the social notion that parenting and housework are not economic work makes their labor undervalued and prevents their lives from being protected from society and family.
Ideation
By showing their invisible labor visually, we would like to encourage SAHMs to recognize how valuable they are, keep them informed of their self-care time every 48 working hours, and have their me-time with the free reward without any guilt.
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User Survey
The main criteria for selecting 20 respondents were a woman, a person who is currently a SAHM, and 25 to 55 years old.
“It would be a good tool to make me realize that my life is not worthless and boring, but productive and valuable if this gives motivation to my life”
“I really appreciate the intention and purpose of this project that speaks for a SAHM, and respect the idea that brings up a societal problem that’s not commonly discussed no matter how this project will be successful or not”
In the meantime, there were the points that should be considered:
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Beneficial and practical reward
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Easy and simple interface
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Sharing with their partner
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Helpful resources for a newborn mom
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Refine Key Features
01
Housework
Management
Many experts strongly suggested that as a way to reduce mental energy and increase the productivity of busy moms, it is strongly helpful to create a routine for housework and parenting. Based on this idea, we provide SAHMs with a task management tool to help them make daily routines for the morning, afternoon, and evening. Then, they just need to check their daily schedule on this platform and mark what they completed.
02
Housework Calculator (Statistics)
We track a user’s working hours based on what they checked and calculate their value with the housework calculator. This result value is provided as objective data so that their me-time can be aware of and acceptable by their family and themselves as well.
03
Rewards Coupon
When the user’s working hours are tracked and filled with 48 hours, three reward coupons are provided to the user. They choose one of them to use within a week. The Rewards given to SAHMs are not for their baby or family, but for themselves. The purpose of the reward is to support their me-time. As the users get the reward which is unpredictable until they fill up 48 working hours, the brain becomes excited and releases dopamine in the mesolimbic pathway, which creates higher motivation and a sense of accomplishment that is often missing in their real-life tasks.
04
Advice & Tips
Based on their interests which were selected by the user on the first page, we provide personalized resources to help users’ work-life balance in real life and update personalized tips depending on the age of their baby, which can lead to getting users involved in the service. Also, this may prove to the user that we constantly support them and are actively working to provide new and helpful content to the user.
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User Journey Map
The purpose of using Momday is to manage tasks of their housework, see the value of invisible labor, share their value with others, and get an exclusive offer as a reward every 48 working hours.
“I don't want to rewrite recurring routine again and again”
“It would be time waste to input text”
"I forget something I need to do today"
"How do I share monthly invoice with my family?"
"There is no reward I’m interested in for my self-care time at this time"
The opportunities derived from pain points are:
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By allowing a routine to be set as a routine, users can avoid repetitive input they feel like as extra work and time waste
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Voice control can reduce the inconvenience of having to open an app each time a user completes a task
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Add a button to save the image of their invoice to albums so that they can share on Instagram as well as any kind of communication tool
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Add a setting to control a pop-up
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Getting information about what they want to do during their self-care time when users sign up
Product Definition
“Momday” is SAHM’s support system for making them realize how valuable themselves are and creating their self-care time every 48 working hours. It provides (a.)task management tool that creates daily routines to save SAHM’s daily mental energy and stress, (b.)the visualized statistics of their real labor value, and (c.)rewards to them every 48 working hours so that the users can have their me-time regularly without any guilt.
Prototype
My next step was starting to visualize user task flow. I had a few different versions but ended up deciding that the version below was the most promising. Below is a summary of the Hi-fi wireframes I developed based on the paper prototype.
0.0 Onboarding Pages
1.0 Create Routines
1.1 Task Management
2.0 Statistics | 3.0 Tips
4.0 Rewards
Final Mock-up
Here is the final prototype! You can explore an entire journey of Momday once clicking this mockup image.
Conclusion
I hope Momday project will be the first step for raising awareness about the value of unpaid domestic work by giving it a price tag and time. It’s not an enormous thing, but it might be a place to begin that family and society are considering the substantial right of SAHMs as much as the one who works outside.
