A wearable for kids

At launch, Littlebird was the smallest cellular-enabled wearable for toddlers on the market. Littlebird gives parents access to their child’s location, health, and activity metrics, all at a glance. Together with Littlebird founder Monica Plath, we designed a proprietary companion app to accompany the wearable tracker, to help them check in with and feel connected to their child, even when they’re away.

Empowering your care circle

From our many conversations with parents and caregivers on childcare and data tracking, we defined a feature set that put peace of mind at the forefront: easy hardware pairing, seamless handoffs and caregiver management, actionable health data, and photo updates.

Custody and location tracking features help parents identify when handoffs occur, and a digital ‘tether’ alerts those with little explorers when their child wanders. All updates are saved to a central timeline.

what is a mood?

The app captures not only biometric data, but encourages caregivers to include qualitative updates, such as a child’s mood. But how does one capture a mood? Is it a gradient? An emoji? Below are some of our experiments in capturing and tracking moods.

The handoff tradeoff

We developed a handoff feature to remove the guesswork out of changing caregivers. We included ample affordances to help parents and caregivers confirm a successful transfer of care, ensuring a higher degree of trust. This meant foregoing a “flashier” handoff interaction for a time-sensitive confirmation request. The result was less potential for confusion or accidental handoffs.

The digital Tether

In-app banners and push notifications alert caregivers and parents alike of their child’s whereabouts, removing the stressful guesswork from zoo and grocery outings.

the nitty gritty: led pairing states

Users needed to understand how to pair their wristband device to the app. We specified and prototyped LED pairing states, which we vetted and refined with our engineering team.

Visual design refresh

Together with the client and our internal brand team, we refined the look and feel of the existing app to be playful yet reassuring. Care and health updates needed to be easy to spot, and data easy to parse at a glance.

key experiences

• Collaboration with product engineers to define Bluetooth + LTE connectivity scenarios

• QA with Littlebird’s development team to bug check the app