Sprout was created by a team of three graduate students studying UX design at Pratt Institute in a timeframe of three months. It was a class project for the course Advanced UX Design. After sharing thoughts, we decided to design an app for women who just gave birth to help them log their newborn babies’ daily routine activities (eating/sleeping/diaper changing) and document their baby’s growth and development by saving health records and collect treasured moments in a form of media (photo/video/audio/journal). To complete the project, we conducted our user research primarily by interviewing with women who just gave birth; collected and synthesized research data with a use of affinity diagrams, experience map, and competitive analysis; brainstormed user journeys and potential opportunities; and created iterative prototypes for user testing. Within three months, we were able to develop two fully functional features. The first feature is that users are able to log their baby feeding time and have the app remind them for next time feeding. The second feature is that users are able to create an entry to document any experience by entering texts and importing media. Our actual design was implemented into different phases, including paper sketching, wireframing, and prototyping. In each round of design creation, we created each screen individually and brought them together to discuss the final look. We brought the prototype to new users every time to test it out for further amends. While testing the iterations, we delivered presentations and had feedback from experienced professionals introduced by our professor. Considering future development of the app, we designed Sprout button that could trigger actions from the app without having to physically touch the screen. We believe that by creating continuous designs and incorporations future ideas, we could make the most powerful and useful app to relieve mothers from the stress of taking care of newborn babies.

We believe that our submission is worthy of a UX award because of two main reasons. First, our mobile app is an effective solution to solve a problem that every new mother is facing. From talking to mothers, we learned that having to adapt their original life schedule to the baby’s was extremely difficult to them. Newborn babies need to be fed every 2 or 3 hours, and their sleeping and defecating need to be monitored. Before, mothers and the family use pens and paper to note down a baby’s schedule. With Sprout, a mother could transfer from taking lots of notes to simply tapping on her phone. She can log a baby’s schedule of eating, sleeping, and diaper changing with Sprout, and even set up an alarm to remind her when she needs to do these next time. As the baby grows, Sprout can help her document the baby’s growth and development. It can also connect users with each other so that mothers will have an online platform to share ideas and ask questions. We believe that Sprout will strongly prove how mothers’ life could be made better with current technology. Second, when considering edge cases how mothers may interact with Sprout, we proposed several more concepts that take advantage of emerging technologies to vary the form of Sprout. These concepts deeply touched the problem that new mothers may have limited access to their phones in some tough situations. We bring in the concept of Internet of Things in a way that Sprout could be found not only on a smartphone, but anywhere in the home environment. It can be presented not only in a form of mobile app, but also a dash button, a smart bottle, or even a sensor assembled in necklace, so that it could intelligently work with the mobile app to better serve our users with various needs. In this way, we believe that Sprout is a perfect sample of demonstrating the future of UX.