02 Brainstorming

01 Sketches

02 Wireframes

After each member of our team had brainstormed individually, we met to discuss our initial ideas and use them as a starting point for our group brainstorming session. Together, we built on each others' ideas to generate a number of intriguing and innovative application concepts. Some of the more interesting initial suggestions included: an application that determines the mode of transportation for an elderly person in order to keep her informed about the percentage of distance spent exercising (via walking) an application that measures how long a working father has spent with his child and provides subtle reminders to encourage more play time a device worn by a child, which captures moments via sound and image to create audio-visual mementos for parents to share with each other an application that suggests the closest restaurants that meet the user's nutritional needs and dietary restrictions

In narrowing down our choices, we noticed that there were a number of recurring themes. For example, we were all interested in capturing spontaneous moments and experiences, because we saw great value in allowing people to record them. Also, health was an issues that we were hoping to at least indirectly address in our application. Finally, most of our ideas revolved around various aspects of a parent-child relationship.

Combining all these themes into a single coherent concept, we came up with Opportune: an iPhone application that allows parents to find kid-friendly locations on the go and thus enable them to capture and record opportune moments with their child. In addition to the topics outlined above, other influences include Geocaching and Yelp.com.

Informal Research

Once we had agreed on the rough concept of the application, we conducted an informal interview to validate our thoughts on the needs of parents with toddlers needed. We interviewed a mother of two, who was kind enough to share with us some of her experience. Additionally, we browsed several online forums to see what stay-at-home parents were sharing about their days: both what made them happy and what drove them crazy. We also came upon several health-related articles that warned about toddler obesity becoming a greater problem. This motivated us to enable our application to record the amount of play-time spent by children, so that parents can track how much exercise the little ones have had at any time.