After having explained my motivations for wanting to develop an application that made life easier for new parents in the last blog, I wanted to take some time to be more specific about what the application will do when it's available. I'm going to tell you about my favorite feature first: night mode.
Night mode is going to be, in my opinion, one of the best aspects of having this app. Turn on the screen of your phone and immediately have the option of hitting one button (okay, sometimes two or three, but that's the most) and what your baby was doing at three in the morning is recorded. When you're lucid again the next day, you can go back and look at whether you fed your baby twice on one breast by accident, whether he was up every hour and a half or two hours to eat, whether he was wet or poopy, or how long your baby was awake when he decided play time started at three in the morning. Nights all blurred together for me after a while, and although it wasn't really critical to know whether or not the diaper I changed last night was wet or poopy, when my son didn't poop for almost a week I wished I had been able to remember which late night it was exactly that I had changed that diaper; when my left breast decreased its milk production by a noticeable amount, it would have been nice to know how long I had been favoring my right breast in the middle of the night. So, night mode will be easy, even in a sleep deprived, exhaustive state. When the screen comes up, there will be three main buttons, the feeding buttons: left, right, and bottle. Once you hit the left or right button, you're done; it's that simple. If you hit the bottle button, you'll have the option to put in the number of ounces or you can add that information in later. When you hit the diaper button, you can input whether the diaper is wet or poopy, or skip it. The awake button at the bottom keeps track of how long the little one is awake before allowing you some more sleep. I wanted it to be as clean and effortless as was possible.
My original idea was to have an application specifically for keeping track of what a baby did at night; but once you start thinking about how much easier things would be to keep an eye on if you could do it on your phone, there are a lot of things that go into taking care of a baby during the day that could be made simpler as well. And thus, it became clear that the application needed to be more comprehensive. It's definitely more convenient to know how long your baby is napping every day and how often, how long it has been since they last ate, whether or not they're due for medicine, etc. There's also a nice function that helps breast feeding (and thus inevitably, pumping) moms keep track of how often they're pumping, and how much they're producing during those pumps. There's a button that tells you when the next pediatrician appointment is, and an alarm to remind you a day or so beforehand. Everything in day mode is important not because it isn't possible to keep track of it in other ways, but because having everything in one place, available at all times, is so much more ideal. It allows busy parents to keep track of things without having to wrack their brains every time they need to recall something. If both parents have the app, they can check on when the last diaper change was without necessarily having to ask their significant other (who I imagine for this scenario, is getting a nap).
I'm including pictures of the early mock-ups for the application here. They're not the finished product, but as someone who often learns more effectively through visual aids, I thought it would be nice if I included them. That way what I'm trying to describe means a little more; you get an idea of the form and the function.
