Encouragement Boxes
Lockdown left parents doing two jobs in one room, and the ones we interviewed described a shortage of acknowledgement rather than a shortage of help. We designed a subscription box of handwritten encouragement and flowers. Testing turned it around: parents liked it and would not buy it for themselves, only for someone else.
The problem
Fall 2020, eight months into shelter in place. The prompt was broad: understand how parents were coping with the pandemic and find something a designer could do about it.
What the interviews returned was not a shortage of help. It was a shortage of acknowledgement. Work and home had collapsed into one continuous shift with no end of day to measure anything against, and the small wins that used to be visible to a colleague or another parent at pickup now happened alone in a house.
Research
Six parents, from a mother of infant twins finishing a graduate degree to a kindergarten teacher raising the two children she was also teaching.
Three things held across all of them. There was no separation left between home life and work life. There was pressure to be perfect, applied from outside and from themselves. And there was no stopping point, no part of the day that belonged to the parent rather than to a responsibility.
The last one became the constraint everything else had to pass. Every parent we spoke to was already carrying more than she could finish. Anything we designed that asked her to do something would be one more thing.
Twenty-four ideas against the guiding question. Most of them are software, and most of them are a task.
Nothing that adds a task
Most of what went on the board was software. An app that assigns chores, a reminder tool for doing several things at once, a dispenser of gold stars, a schedule optimizer. Several were jokes about superpowers, which is what a guiding question about feeling like a superhero parent invites.
Nearly all of them failed the constraint. An app that organizes her day is something to set up, learn, and maintain, handed to the person whose problem is that she has too much to maintain. The ideas that asked nothing were the ones where something simply arrived: a person delivering food, an automatic delivery of encouraging notes. In late 2020 anything involving a person arriving was unavailable.
What was left was delivery. We took the note.
Giving instead of receiving
The first prototype was a subscription a parent buys for herself. A plan screen with a duration, a price band, and a control for how much positivity she wanted, then a box at her door.
We tested it with ten parents, including the six from the interviews. They liked it and they would not buy it. Almost every one redirected it to somebody else: a friend, a sibling, another parent having a worse year.
The second round explained it. In a year conducted through screens, physical objects had become disproportionately valuable. Email and e-cards arrived constantly and were dismissed. A card that could be kept, or put on a shelf, was different, and it was different because a person had chosen to send it.
That was what the product was actually selling, and it is not something anyone can buy for themselves. Encouragement you arrange for yourself is a purchase. Encouragement from someone else is evidence that you were thought about. We rebuilt around the sender.
The product
Three prototypes, three products
Fidelity passes are usually a story about polish. These are three different products.
The first ships weekly for a period the buyer chooses, is bought for yourself, and puts a level of positivity control on the plan screen. The second ships monthly, is addressed to someone else, is priced as a combination of a handwritten letter and a number of flowers, and has dropped the positivity control. The third asks for a plan, a recipient, a written note, and a delivery frequency.
Weekly became monthly on cost and plausibility. A weekly box at a price a person would actually pay did not survive contact with what goes in it, and none of us believed somebody would keep opening one every week for a year.
The pages
The landing page leads with the recipient’s condition rather than the product. The headline is about isolation, the subhead is about delivery, and the box itself is not described until a reader is already several steps down the page. That follows from what the testing found: the thing being bought is the gesture, and the contents are how the gesture gets delivered.
The three steps carried over from the mid-fidelity prototype almost unchanged. Choose a plan, add the recipient and the note, and the box arrives.
The product page puts size, delivery frequency, and the card on one screen, because they are one decision. A sender is not choosing a box and then separately deciding what to say. The card sits above the button rather than after it.
The recipient nobody tested
Every round was run with parents. First as the buyer, then as the sender. Nobody tested the other end of it.
The stated purpose was to make a parent feel reassured. After the pivot, the parent’s job in the product is to pay and to write. Whether a box arriving from a friend does what we said it would do is the claim the whole thing rests on, and we never put one in front of anybody.