LINE Task
Mitigate Burnout Among Working Mothers during WFH by Assigning Tasks to Children
CONTEXT
TEAM
ROLE
TOOLS
OVERVIEW
Personal Project
Plug-in
6 Week
Wei-Hsiang Lo
User Research
Concept Development
Industrial Design
User-Center Design
Figma
FigJam
Adobe Illustrator
After Effects
LINE
As a project I did during the epidemic, I sought to understand the causes of burnout and voluntary quitting among working mothers during WFH, with the goal of addressing the issue through a design that could be launched quickly.
"LINE Task" is a plug-in that comes with LINE to help working mothers maintain a work-life balance during WFH. With this plug-in, mothers can focus on their work and their children will not feel lonely as a result.
Create an opportunity for working mothers to focus on a single task and provide motivation for children to be alone while their mothers are working.
DESIGN
OBJECTIVE
📏 Draw the line between work and life
LINE Task helps working mothers who WFH set boundaries between work and kids so they can stay focused while handling important work.
Single-tasking, Accompanying, and Incentive
🥺 Pay attention to the child's feelings
LINE Task provides companionship experiences for young children so they don't feel alone while their mothers are at work.
🚦 Develop a sense of order in children
LINE Task uses a timer and reward system to teach children to do things in the right order.
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PROBLEM
STATEMENT
How can parent-child interaction experiences be designed to mitigate burnout among working mothers during WFH?
DESIGN
SOLUTION
Design a plug-in that assigns tasks to children so that working mothers can handle important work without worrying about being disturbed by their children.
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Task Assignment
Working mothers use LINE Task to quickly assign tasks to their children. The time is chosen so that the children know when the mother has completed her work, and the task category is chosen to prevent mothers from assigning the same task repeatedly.
Task Completion Check
Mothers can verify the task by scanning the QR code displayed after children complete the task. This function records completed tasks as vouchers for redeeming prizes.
Children
Mother
Reward System
Mothers can reward their children for each task they complete. This system increases the willingness of children to complete tasks, but it also reduces the guilt mothers feel about not being able to be with their children.
Accompanying Partner
When the AR icon is clicked, the Avatar from the LINE Task is presented on the screen as an AR and accompanies the child to complete the task assigned by the mother.
Children
Mother
Children
01
Understanding Background
02
Exploratory Research
03
Concept
Development
04
Designing
LINE Task
THE
PROCESS
Why Choose Working Women?
Research Plan
What Kind of Working Women?
Design Principle
HMW & JTBD & MVP
Journey Map
Key Task Scenarios
Design Style
Mobile GUI Overview
Get a Deep Understanding
of UsersWhat are Some Patterns our Users Share?
Parents, especially mothers, are struggling during the COVID-19 pandemic. ( 60% of parents say they have experienced burnout in the past year.) With the sudden onslaught, parents have had to find a way to balance family and work. And it's not easy, especially when it affects the quality of parenting, which is sad when many mothers are forced to leave their jobs to care for their children.
RESEARCH QUESTION
Why Choose Working Women?
01 Understanding Background
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🤯 Why do working mothers feel burnout, and how does it happen?
Understand the plight of working mothers during WFH, examine the causes of burnout, and gain enough knowledge to drive design.
To answer the research question, I developed a research plan and chose what I thought would be the most appropriate research method.
🙌 How do working mothers respond to this?
🩹 What should we design?
Resources: McKinsey & Company etc.
Find out how they define burnout and how they deal with this negativity, including the problems they face and their attitudes toward them.
Identify potential opportunities that can be effectively addressed by design.
Research Plan
In this context, as part of the study, we set out to answer the following questions:
FIRST-ROUND
RESEARCH
INSIGHT - 2
🤦♀️ Parenting responsibilities
are not shared equitably.
Mothers end up spending more time on housework and parenting than fathers, so they are more likely to be distracted at home.
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INSIGHT - 3
😈 Flexible work
is a big scam.
The flexibility of WFH can be a scary thing for parents with young children, as most people don't have the means to multitask.
In conducting the secondary research, the following prompt keywords were used, such as "Work-life imbalance." "The impact of WFH on working mothers." "How COVID-19 contributes to parental burnout?" and "Why do women leave their jobs at a higher rate than men?"
What Kind of Working Woman?
INSIGHT - 1
🚧 No Boundaries between work and life.
Mothers are unable to maintain their focus at work due to the distractions of their children.
In addition, when spending time with their children, they transfer their emotions from work to them.
From this literature and trend reports, I extracted Persona and key insights. These findings are not precise but are helpful in defining users.
Information from the secondary research
36 yrs old she / her
"Children can't understand why they can't communicate with their parents all day when they're both home."
Emily Chen
Persona
They are senior working mothers with heavy workloads but also care for children up to sixth grade. Children in this age group are very dependent on their mothers.
My second round of research was based on interviews with 8 WFH-working mothers with young children. I think mothers who are in the WFH will have deeper feelings, so I recruited a group of people from various social software as the main interviewees.
As the interviews were semi-structured, I organized the content obtained during the interviews and used value proposition maps to describe the findings.
SECOND-ROUND
RESEARCH
Job
Get a Deep Understanding of the Users
02 Exploratory Research
To locate the user's pain points, I asked the respondents to briefly describe their daily lives and use that to find patterns. And this helped me map the pain points to identify design opportunities.
Find ways to maintain
a work-life balance while WFH.
Pain
What are Some Patterns our Users Share?
Feeling guilty for refusing a child's request.
Cannot multitask and need to stay
focused while working.Don’t know how to communicate effectively with children.
Gain
Ease the children's loneliness
while their mothers are at work.Know how to help children
arrange activities properly.
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Emily Chen
36 yrs old she / her
ANALYSIS
USER
JOURNEY
Interviews : 8 women
Photos from the interviews
Interview transcripts
User journey
User insights based on the value proposition map
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Card sorting
"Children can't understand why they can't communicate with their parents all day when they're both home."
We prioritized the potential problems and used a 2x2 matrix to sort out the times and contexts where users were most disturbed. The most annoying parts for parents were before lunch and before getting off work. What these two times have in common is that parents are finishing up important work and kids are just waking up or getting bored, which can lead to burnout as they are distracted by two high-intensity events at the same time.
Design Opportunities
Opportunity matrix
To help us move forward, I used HMW for concept development and JTBD to identify constraints to ensure the design did not deviate from our findings. Finally, the MVP matrix was used to find the best solution and identify the key tasks for the subsequent design.
IDEATION
HMW & JTBD & MVP
03 Concept Development
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🧐 Single-tasking
The design follows three key principles: In addition to allowing mothers to handle one thing at a time, it is also necessary to create a companionship experience for children. Finally, compensate the children through incentives.
Stay focused when important work needs
to be done.
🙋♀️ Incentive
HMW & JTBD
Provide adequate incentives for children
to wait alone.
🧑🤝🧑 Accompanying
MVP Plot
Design Principles
Keeping children from feeling alone while their mothers focus
on their work.
KEY TASK - 2
🐶 Accompanying Partner ( AR )
KEY TASK - 1
📋 Task Assignment
KEY TASK - 3
🥇 Reward System
KEY TASK - 4
📑 Task Completion Check
Considering the design of the parent-child interaction and the need for a quick launch during the pandemic, a plug-in on LINE was the best solution.
The Plug-in for LINE
Minimum Viable Product
📳 In Taiwan, 70% of parents use LINE to communicate with their children aged 6-12 at least once a day.
💻 Social software is also the best way to communicate with the kids during WFH.
💃 In the 2020 survey report, LINE was the most penetrated social networking software in Taiwan, accounting for approximately 95.7% of the total.
Below is a journey map of the LINE Task designed by integrating design opportunities and principles. When working mothers seek focus and children seek companionship, LINE Task will provide fluid and intuitive interaction.
Journey Map
SYNTHESIZE
-
Job
VALUE
PROPOSITION
Find ways to maintain
a work-life balance while WFH.
Pain
Feeling guilty for refusing a child's request.
Cannot multitask and need to stay
focused while working.Do not know how to
communicate effectively with children.
Gain
Ease the children's loneliness
while their mothers are at work.Know how to help children
arrange activities properly.
Product
Task assignment plug-in on LINE.
Pain Reliever
Use a reward system to keep children motivated in doing the task and to reduce the mother's guilt.
Assign tasks to the children while handling important work so that the mother can concentrate.
Gain Creator
Use LINE's Avatar with AR to keep children company while they accept a task set by mothers.
Provide task records to prevent mothers from scheduling the same tasks over and over again.
Before drawing the wireframes, I started with the user flow of the key tasks: task assignment, accompanying partner, rewards system, and task completion check. Because this is an interaction between mother and child, it is necessary to consider how to make the experience smooth for both parties.
PROTOTYPE & DEFINE
Key Task Scenarios
04 Designing LINE Task
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This is the final interface where I highlight the key insights from the study. It mainly shows the four major functions of the application, assigning, companioning, rewarding, and checking. Working mothers avoid distractions at work by assigning tasks to their children, and children receive companionship and rewards for completing the assigned tasks.
DESIGNING
INTERFACE
Mobile GUI Overview
Since it is a plug-in designed on LINE, it is designed according to LINE's design system.
🐶 Accompanying Partner ( AR ) - Children
🥇 Reward System - Children to Mother
📑 Task Completion Check - Mother to Children
📋 Task Assignment - Mother
Use AR avatars as partners to ease children’s loneliness. After entering the AR mode, the task will count down in AR until it ends.
Children are easily attracted to the reward system. By using task completion as a voucher to redeem rewards, children can be highly motivated.
The mother confirms that the child has completed the task by scanning the completed QR code on the child's phone, which ensures that the task is not confirmed by the child.
Task assignment is a major demand of working mothers, and how to quickly assign tasks using LINE's chat system was something I had to think about.
Design Style
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ASSIGN
ACCOMPANY
REWARD
CHECK
Plug-in Design
Don't reinvent the wheel. Research has found that it is more efficient to design a plugin in social software that already has a large number of users than to create a new application.
Reflection
User research in a Pandemic
COVID-19 made the user interview difficult because it had to be conducted online, whereas the face-to-face interview was much easier. Fortunately, the interviewees were very friendly and willing to take questions after the interview.
The Power of the User Journey
This project didn't require much time on the UI, so I spent more time designing a two-way interactive experience. Through journey mapping, the needs of both parties were well-defined and the design was improved through user testing and feedback.