Gathering Insights – Surveying the Troops

During the process of building Little Doors, there would be times where we couldn’t agree on feature details, or priorities, or actions a user would take.

“Well, if I were a parent, I would…. blahblahblah”

But the thing is, Little Doors isn’t just for us. It’s for many kinds of parents. And grandparents. And aunts and uncles. All over the country.

So we decided to ask them.

Let’s make a survey

I put together a little survey covering general habits, thoughts, and actions. It took about 7-10 minutes – which I knew was a bit long. We sent the longer survey to our closest family and friends and then made some tweaks (based on answers that were interesting and those that weren’t or maybe could be condensed). We posted this “new and improved” survey on social media and to more friends. If you want a peek or to take that survey yourself it can be found here: https://lunarlincoln.typeform.com/to/bntKEv

Sidenote: No where in the survey did we ask about Little Door’s features specifically because we wanted to know what kinds of values and thoughts our potential audience shared pre-Little Doors. It’s much easier to fit into a niche that is already formed than trying to get honest opinions on something entirely new and specific.

We also used Typeform so that I could have a single branching survey instead of one survey for parents and one for family and friends. This made sharing easier – but parsing responses a bit more difficult since about half of the survey was completed each time depending on who you were. I also love the way Typeform handles the UI and analytics for surveys – very user friendly on both web and mobile.

I was shooting for 15-30 responses. Nothing statistically significant but enough to capture the various kinds of parents and family members. Surprisingly my friends and family are awesome and helpful and we ended up with 62 responses, doubling my goal. Boosh!

 

Interesting things we learned

  • Not a single parent or family member thinks their children spend enough time with long distance family members. Everyone wants to do a better job with this. (Interestingly the parents seem to feel slightly worse about it than the extended family).
  • Scheduling seems to be a big issue, whether its time zones, busy work schedules, or having to have a parent present to facilitate.
  • Everyone prefers video – so that they can see that kiddo’s cute, growing face.
  • Attention span for toddlers seems an issue – coming up with interesting topics to chat about can be challenging. (Oooooh, could there be an additional feature here?)
  • Single children homes are much less likely to allow screentime for their toddlers whereas multichildren homes seem a bit more lenient. (Makes sense, and I would love to see a geographic breakdown of this sentiment too)
  • Most families ensure that the content their child is viewing is educational in addition to being entertaining.

Why do a survey?

If we had learned that parents think they’re doing a great job, video chatting is a breeze, and not a single person would let a 4 year old use an app – well then….we might be barking up the wrong tree. It’s good to challenge your assumptions and make sure your product is something people need and want. Luckily most of our responses fit within our previous assumptions.

Surveys also give you insight. We managed to learn about specific markets to focus on (multichildren families), and additional features we could add (suggestions prior to recording a video).

Surveys give me an engaged list of potential beta testers. We’re planning on sending versions of the app out next week and I already have a short list of who to reach out to.

Finally surveys are an amazing, lightweight way to get outside of your office and peek into other perspectives. You may not always BE your  target audience, but surveys will let you peek into their brains if only for a few minutes.

Resources

 

Prototyping your Assumptions

When building any product you initially make some assumptions:

  • Kids like videos
  • People like sending videos
  • Long videos are boring

A bad product development habit is to take those assumptions and run allllll the way to market. I AM A GENIUS AND ALWAYS RIGHT. EVERYONE WILL LOVE THESE FEATURES NO MATTER WHAT. But we all know what happens when you assume right?

So hold up before you set those ideas in code. Make some prototypes and….ASK PEOPLE. Do you like this? How about this? What do you do when you have the option to do this? As you may have read before, we validated our largest assumption of all with Prototype One: Do kids like to watch videos? Do kids like to watch videos of people they know? And the answer was a resounding yes. (They’re even quoting videos back to us weeks later).

But now we have more subtle assumptions. Parents will want to record tons of videos.  Kids will like shorter videos better. Kids like videos of other things too. Are these things true?

How do we test this? By not telling anyone what we’re testing and just watching what they do when given the means to play. Enter Prototype Two:

  • Ability to create your own videos (no limit on length).
  • Ability for kids to watch videos that were recording on the same device
  • Ability for kids to watch videos of stock content (ladybug, fish, money, race car)

Little Doors Prototype Two

What do we want to learn?

  • How many videos will parents make?
  • Will kids watch stock videos more?
  • On average how long of a video will they record?
  • Do kids watch shorter videos more times?

How do we learn all these things from a prototype? Well, we do two things. We build in analytics in the code of the prototype itself.  Analytic tools like Flurry tell us where, when, how many times someone taps something in the app. Analytics can’t tell you how a user feels or things just their actions, so we also talk with our testers through surveys and one on ones.

Currently Prototype Two is out in the wild. If you would like to get your hands on it – sign up and we’ll send you a download. Or if you already have it – send us those survey results (Reading them is like opening a Christmas present. Really!)

Which Way Now? Finding our Feature Set

 

The big picture is always pretty easy.
We want our child to remain connected to family and friends who are far off (in a fun way).
Presto-chango – FINAL APP!

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Right?

Wrong. It’s the details that are hard. How do you get from that idea to a real product and EXACTLY how does that product work? What goes into it? What falls to the cutting room floor? What are we saving for later?

FEATURES MY FRIENDS, FEATURES.

Here are our big features we’re definitely including:

  • Ability to record and send videos to others (your granddaughter, nephew, or neighbor-kid)
  • Ability for kids to watch video doors in a simple, safe environment

Other bonus features that would be nice but which ones??

  • Ability for people to record “guided” educational content. Grandma sings the ABCs, Aunt Laura teaches you colors
  • Ability for kids to watch video doors of content that isn’t a person. Doors of race cars, doors of kittens, etc

We do think its important for kids to jump straight into being able to use the Little Doors without waiting for Aunt Carol to record her video. Or having new things to play with and discover once they’ve run through their family doors and for this reason we think “bonus feature number 2” might make it into Version 1.0.

We also love the idea of having Little Doors be not only fun and familliar but also educational, however getting parents and family to learn how to record custom, guided content in addition to regular doors might be asking a bit much straight off the bat. Cool but complicated “bonus feature number 1” might be bumped to Version 2.0.

Making these decisions is hard. Everything is a good idea for someone, the real question is which is the BETTER idea and the MOST beneficial. Weighing development and audience and interest is a hard scale to balance. We hope with a mixture of surveys, consulting friends and family, and some targeted Facebook ads we’ll be able to deduce if this feature set is the winner.

What do you think? Go here and tell us. Really!

[trx_button bgcolor=”accent1″ type=”square” style=”filled” size=”medium” bg_style=”custom” align=”center” link=”http://goo.gl/forms/5eTuSg39Ho” popup=”no”]FEATURE SURVEY[/trx_button]

 

We didn’t even begin to talk about other features and tweaks that didn’t make the initial cut at all…

  • What if we could organize the doors?
  • What if we could customize the door color or photo?
  • What about recording the kid’s reaction?
  • What about having multiple kids accounts?
  • What about saving doors to share with others?
  • What about responding to doors?
  • What about themed door for holidays and events?
  • What if we could add images and filters to videos?
  • What if we could have shared family doors?

Great ideas for another day.

Validating our Idea

So we have the idea. Check.
And WE think the idea is good. Check.
And our friends seem to think the idea is good. Check. 

But what do kids think? What about those adorable 2, 3, 4, and 5 year olds?

Sounds like it’s time to build a prototype. 

A prototype is a quick and fast way to build a rough version of your app without the polish or complete features of the final product. Prototypes allow you to verify assumptions about design or features without spending the time and money on something user’s may not want.

Our first prototype had the following:

  • There was a single screen with doors
  • The doors could wiggle
  • There were pre-recorded videos behind the doors.
  • When you tapped a door it would play the video then return you to the door screen

I had to call upon my days as a preschool teacher to record those awkward pre-recorded videos in our office conference room. Pig noises, crossed eyes, zooming around: I packed that app with everything my former three year olds loved.

 

It was pretty rough. Luckily kids are pretty forgiving.

Now to see if kids actually played with and liked the basic concept of Little Doors. Do we have a product? Or should we return to the drawing board?

First we rounded up our family and friends who volunteered their kiddos to be the very first testers of the app. We sent them the app and waited to see what they thought.

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And what did they think?

We’ll let you tell them yourself….

“Lydia loved seeing a person talking to her or doing something funny. She wanted to listen to them over and over again.”

 

“Avery really liked watching the videos, it kept her entertained.”

 

“Easy to use for both my 18-month old and 33-month old to navigate. Fun to see what surprise video was behind each door.”

 

LITTLE DOORS “the idea” IS A SUCCESS.

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Now for the hard part. What features to include…

Coming up: How we create and pick features. 

 

The Light Bulb Moment

The light bulb moment for Little Doors didn’t actually happen for us. It happened for our friend Ian Broyles. However, once he pitched it to us, we saw the light too.

Ian does not live near his family who is based in Kansas. Spending time in LA and Nashville – it was difficult for his family and friends to keep in touch with his awesome kid Winston. And you know how fast kids grow, hanging out once or twice a year was not enough! Video chatting required the full attention and phone time of both Ian and Winston. You had to schedule time with each person and time zones were sometimes an issue.

Why not build something that could play family messages for Winston whenever he wanted, wherever he wanted. Grandma on the car trip. Uncle Andrew before dinner. Cousins Jim and Jessica at the grocery store. Thus the Little Doors idea was born.

As an idea that is. But ideas are a dime and dozen and it was time to make it real.

This blog is a chronicle of what it really takes to build an app. Idea to Phone. Head to Hand.