Creating the next breakthrough in Toddler Feeding
Corporate-Partnered Capstone Project between Jarden, a Fortune 500 Consumer products company and our team, Kids at Heart.
Toddlers: Busy, Funny, Messy, Chaotic Little Humans
Rapid Brain Growth.
Emerging self-identities.
Learning to feed themselves.
Having a toddler is one, big adventure like no other...
...and we're here to help.
Our Job:
Find an unmet need in toddler feeding and create a product to enhance the toddler feeding process.
Our Team:
We named our team 'Kids at Heart' to signify both the fact that we had kids' best interest at heart in exploring this project, as well as the fact that we had to understand kids' needs as though they were our own in order to build a truly breakthrough product.
Team: Hayley Somerville, Hannah Graffeo, Behnam Heydari, Peiju Shih, Adriana Jimenez, Amanda Olar
Our Process:
1. Understand the Toddler Feeding Landscape to Identify the Opportunities
Secondary research, Interviews, Observation
First, we set out to understand the toddler feeding 'space,' researching the factors that explain what it is to be a toddler and what it is to be a parent of a toddler. What's the age range of a toddler? What's the average income of families with toddlers? Who buys the products - mom, dad, or someone else? How much do single parents spend on their children vs. two-parent households? What are parents' top concerns in feeding their children? What sorts of technology are out there to enhance the process?
We found answers to all of these questions and more, and put them together to look for gaps in the marketplace to find potential for product opportunities.
With this knowledge in mind, we interviewed parents of toddlers and observed toddlers at mealtime to further understand the reality of feeding a toddler. And from this, we created 101 potential product opportunities.
We used a ranking matrix of the top needs of the consumer, of Nuk, and of our team to boil these opportunities down to the top 3, and then a final opportunity after doing additional user research to find where there was the greatest opportunity to create a breakthrough product.
As this is an ongoing project with the company, please ask me in person to share with you the identified Focus Opportunity.
2. Intensive User Research and Personas
User Research Phase included analyzing the nearly 70 respondents to a questionnaire; 6 in-depth, personal interviews; and multiple immersion experiences in homes of parents and at daycare.
(1) Messy baby image courtesy of: http://www.personal.psu.edu/afr3/blogs/siowfa13/2013/12/the-messier-the-smarter.html
All other images are mine and/or the team's.