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.
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
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Understand the plight of working mothers during WFH, examine the causes of burnout, and gain enough knowledge to drive design.
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Find out how they define burnout and how they deal with this negativity, including the problems they face and their attitudes toward them.
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Identify potential opportunities that can be effectively addressed by design.
Our Goal
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LINE Task helps working mothers who WFH set boundaries between work and kids so they can stay focused while handling important work.
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LINE Task provides companionship experiences for young children so they don't feel alone while their mothers are at work.
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LINE Task uses a timer and reward system to teach children to do things in the right order.
How can parent-child interaction experiences be designed to mitigate burnout among working mothers during WFH?
00 DESIGN OBJECTIVE
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 prizes.
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.
DESIGN SOLUTION
Children
Mother
Children
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.
01 RESEARCH
02 IDEATION
• HMW & JTBD & MVP
• Concept
03 EVALUATION
04 FINAL GUI
• What Kind of Working Woman?
• Understanding the Users
• User Testing
• Findings & Redesign
• Main Task
• Design Output
05 TAKE OUT
• User Research in a Pandemic
• The Power of the User Journey
01 RESEARCH
In conducting the secondary research, the following prompt keywords were used, such as "Work-life imbalance." "The impact of WFH on working mothers." How does COVID-19 contribute to parental burnout?" and "Why do women leave their jobs at a higher rate than men?"
🤦♀️ 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.
Insight
Information from the Secondary Research
What Kind of Working Woman?
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.
Understanding the Users
Interview Transcripts
Card Sorting
🚧 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.
😈 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.
Photos from the Interviews
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
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.
Persona
🧐 Job
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.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.
💡 Product
Task assignment plug-in on LINE.
💊 Pain Reliever
Use a reward system to keep children motivated to do 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.
01 🧐 Single-tasking
02 🧑🤝🧑 Accompanying
• Keeping children from feeling alone while their mothers focus on their work.
03 🙋♀️ Incentive
• Provide adequate incentives for children to wait alone.
• Stay focused when important work needs to be done.
Concept
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.
02 IDEATION
HMW & JTBD & MVP
Design Opportunities
User Journey
• 📋 Task Assignment - Mother
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.
MVP Plot
Mapping
HMW & JTBD
• 🐶 Accompanying Partner
( AR ) - Children
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.
• 🥇 Reward System - Children to Mother
Children are easily attracted to the reward system. By using task completion as a voucher to redeem rewards, children can be highly motivated.
• 📑 Task Completion Check Mother to Children
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.
03 EVALUATION
I designed a prototype using the above concepts and recruited four users to test it and evaluate the problems of the current version. Because it was an epidemic, only two were willing to test it on-site, while the other two were willing to try it online.
User Testing
Findings & Redesign
On-site Testing
• Insight 1 : 👩👧 Needs to be confirmed by the task initiator.
Change :
Information Architecture & Logic
In the confirmation of the completion of the task, the new action of scanning and confirmation by the sender of the task is added. During the testing, it was found that the initial design did not have this double confirmation function, which would lead the children to click to complete the task by themselves.
• Insight 3 : 😵💫 Causes user confusion on some pages.
Change :
The main function (chat) should not be affected
Move the mini-display widget to the upper-right corner to prevent users from accidentally touching it when they want to browse the chat list.
Change :
Add a prompt to the redemption page
When redeeming rewards, the user does not provide further prompts for the selected rewards, resulting in a misunderstanding between the child and the mother.
• Insight 2 : ❌ Some pages are too cluttered with features and are unnecessary.
Change :
Highlight key features and simplify pages
Through testing, we know that users don't need too many labels when assigning tasks, so we highlight the main functions and put other functions on the second or third layer to avoid other text affecting the user's action.
Change :
Adjustment of setting page by test result
1. When users are setting up a task, they don't need to be too precise about the time, they will probably use 15 minutes as an interval, so we set a breakpoint on the time bar to allow users to adjust faster.
2. We also changed the setting function on the left side to the lower right side because we found that users often mistakenly clicked back to the previous page when they were setting up a character.
Online Testing
04 FINAL GUI
• 🐶 Accompanying Partner ( AR ) - Children
• 📋 Task Assignment - Mother
• 📑 Task Completion Check - Mother to Children
• 🥇 Reward System - Children to Mother
• 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.
• 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.
05 TAKE OUT
• 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.