BabyConnect Redesign

The why

My husband (Jeff) and I recently started using the BabyConnect app (https://www.babyconnect.com) to assist us in our breastfeeding journey with our son Jackson. In the hospital, the nurses often asked how long he nursed, which side or both did he nurse on, did he fall asleep, etc. We realized the importance and quickly needed a solution to capture:

  • Time and duration Jackson nursed

  • Time and quantity pumped/added to our milk stash

  • Time and quantity of stash reduced when Jackson took a bottle

For this effort, I followed the Design Sprint process to help me collect my thoughts on the app, pain points, and reframing what to redesign. (🔗 Miro board)

The users

Building empathy for our end users is crucial. Through interviews and observations, we can get a sense of who they are, what they do, what are their pain points and skillsets. For new caretakers, communication is key. Having a system to track feeding, sleep, diapering, and progressive measurements was most important.

The process

The Map is a great tangible resource created to understand the high-level flow a user goes through to complete a task while using the app. Aligning workshop participants to this helps level-set everyone before we start identifying what needs to be solved.

The challenges

The biggest pain point of my post-partum journey and that of the other women I spoke with is the feeling of overwhelm.

The two biggest challenges that contributed to that feeling within the app were:

  • How might we learn more about the needs of our users and present them with features to meet their needs?

  • How might we clearly invite a family member/caregiver to the application?

For this particular effort, the key was not changing the existing process but filling the onboarding void to customize the app and reduce the overwhelm for end users.

The inspiration

During the lightning demo phase, I found the Baby Tracker app which has similar features as Baby Connect and another app outside the baby industry - FitPlan.

Key take-aways from Baby Tracker

  • 5 parent action categories

  • Clearly focused navigation

  • Summary and timeline combined

Key take-aways from FitPlan

  • Onboarding progress indicator

  • Always have an out

  • Clear decision tree

The concept

I love the progression of the Solution Workshop. Starting with note-taking ➡️ doodling ➡️ crazy 8s ➡️ concept drawing.

Note-taking: I started with a mind map of the known Baby Connect features. Looking at the features I started to see an age range theme emerge - features like solid foods weren't relevant to 0 - 3 months. And unless you're some sort of superhero, potty training isn't traditionally relevant until 12 - 24 months.

Doodling: solidified a hypothesis around the age categories and what would be relevant to those ranges.

Crazy 8's: lead to generating the onboarding screens. What would the decision tree look like? What types of questions do we need to ask to get the level of customization we desire?

The Concept: Starting with a welcome screen, I incorporated the skip functionality and the progress tracker. Followed by 3 additional screens

  1. capturing the tiny human's age range

  2. their method of eating and if they're potty trained

  3. additional things they would like to track (i.e. sleep, metrics, milestones)

As I was detailing out the user test flow, I realized the concept wasn't inclusive to parents of multiples. I adjusted the flow to include the child's name and how many children they would be caring for. Instead of asking which category they fell into, the final solution will be asking their age instead.

The Solution

Pain Point 1: Action Overwhelm

Individual Actions

After using the app for a few weeks, I realized many of the actions presented drive you to the same page two with three different tabs.

For example, feed, solid, bottle, and nursing all take you to a tabbed experience around the action eating. Depending on the child's age, some actions are not age-appropriate.


To minimize action overwhelm, I started with the IA. My hypothesis is that most users are frequently looking to track eating, sleeping, diapering/potty, and health metrics (i.e. height, weight, etc.).

Taking an organized, minimalist approach the home page contains an overview of what actions have occurred that day, and then a timeline of the various actions with additional details. The key actions now reside in the navigation bar and for the graphs and charts, I would anticipate users would access them via the hamburger menu.

When you click on the action (i.e. eat), the 4th onboarding screen answers would appear tabbed at the top. In the prototype scenario, the user selected nursing, pumping, bottle-fed breastmilk.


Pain Point 2: Navigation Confusion

App navigation

The first three navigation bar actions are all related to different views of the logged activities. While these certainly speak to my inner data-driven geek, my hypothesis is that these actions aren't used as frequently as the actions parents and caregivers would want to track.

The proposed navigation solution brings those key actions caregivers would be tracking to the navigation bar while making the graphs, timeline, and email available in the hamburger menu.

Pain point 3: Invitation

My husband found BabyConnect, set up the family subscription, and sent me an email invitation to join his family. I received this email less than 48 hours after a major life event and almost missed the email.

Why? It's simple - intention and hierarchy.

This email intends to invite someone to join their Baby Connect family as a parent or caregiver.

A clear, concise subject such as "Jeff has invited you to join his family on Baby Connect" tells me:

  • Who initiated the invitation

  • I need to take action on this email

  • This is for Baby Connect

Once I open the email, some additional context around what I will be able to do when I join Jeff's family would be helpful: "Join Jeff's family today to stay connected on Jackson's feedings, naps, diapers, and much more".

Updating the button to "Join" creates a consistent language in the subject, contents, and call to action but also sounds inviting!

Next Steps: Validation

Now that we have a proposed solution - it's time to validate. I've created a Useberry test to validate the Information Architecture of the proposed solution, as well as answer our sprint questions. Check out the preview of the usability test below.