Monthly Update 2021-03
This edition contains: two instagram posts with bite-sized parenting tips, and some reflections on our recent product experiments.
Have you checked out our Instagram?
We’ve been posting once a week on Instagram at @letsbramble, dispensing bite-sized tips for busy parents everywhere! Over the past 2 weeks, we’ve been working on a series on talking to your kids when you’re feeling triggered. Check them out here (click on the thumbnails):
Product Experiments
We ran 2 rounds of product experiments this month: Cycle 3, and Cycle 4!
Cycle 3
To recap our insights from Cycle 2, we learned that users responded very well to personalisation and having a tight ‘path’ to follow along in their conversations. We therefore wanted to iterate on the ways in which we could create a truly personalised experience.
We took inspiration from what we thought a real-life therapist would do with their clients:
Deeply understand the client’s typical responses and reactions, based on past interactions and stories from the client
Provide personalised interventions that would help them reach the goals that were important to them specifically, rather than generic ones
Personally intervene to defuse the situation when the conversation became violent or tense
Pace the conversation and adapt the flow to clients’ energy levels, time investment, to give a feeling of constant progress and movement.
(This was not an exhaustive list, but we thought these were the most relevant points to progress on for this cycle, before we thought about other inputs and interventions)
Our goals for Cycle 3 were therefore to:
Ensure a high degree of personalisation throughout the conversation, focusing specifically on:
‘Personality types’, derived from a short Parent & Child Questionnaire before the conversation
Duration spent throughout the conversation, and on each move.
Insights from the Cycle 3 Experiment
We quickly realised from the test videos that there was a preliminary step stopping our personalisation from being fully effective: the ability to respond to the naturally changing sub-topics of a conversation, and personalise interventions to that specific sub-topic.
For example, a parent-child pair who started their conversation with the topic of “completing homework by 5PM every day” might have their topic pivot to the sub-topic of “when I do my homework, I feel miserable and alone”. While a therapist would be able to narrow the scope of the conversation based on that statement to the difficult feelings that the child has, our app was ill-equipped to take our users along the same increasingly specific path. We thought this was an essential element that we had to achieve to move forward.
In addition, we realised that users need to see how each of their actions contribute to addressing a recurring challenging behaviour, in order to feel ‘first session value’. This was in contrast to our previous beliefs that a more exploratory conversation would provide new insight into their children, and be the ‘value’ that users came back for. We thought it was necessary to recalibrate our conversational path to better achieve this.
Cycle 4
Based on our insights from Cycle 3, our goals in Cycle 4 were split into content goals, and technical goals.
Content goal:
Help parents and children find an actionable solution(by reframing/ orienting the conversation)
Method: Making a whole new conversation map
Technical goal:
Gather data on how users interact with the app, to see if it’s possible to use facial recognition sentiment analysis
Method: use the front-facing camera to see how often users’ faces are in view of the camera
Test out speech-to-text API that might serve as a foundation for natural language processing (having the app understand what users are saying)
Allow increasingly specific topic definition
Method: create a new type of “move” that has open ended text input fields to
User experience goal:
Make it clearer when the app is acting as the “third-party” in the conversation and speaking directly to the users (as opposed to giving users words to say to each other)
Method: Added cartoon voice overs when the app is talking to users in the style of animal crossing
Tests are currently ongoing, and we’re excited to update you on how it goes!