A mobile app parent’s guide to raising your baby the Montessori way- with grace, courtesy, and understanding from birth to 3 years

Montessori is a renowned educational philosophy founded in the late 1800s by Maria Montessori. While it's now a well-established approach in preschools, Montessori parenting can begin even before birth and continue through the early years of a child's life. From birth, there are specific Montessori activities that can help enrich an infant's development.

I worked as the sole UX Designer.

End to end mobile app.

Ux/UI Design, User research, User interviews, User testing, brand design

Figma, Miro, Survey Monkey

Montibaby is a revolutionary new app that aims to connect new parents with the Montessori Method. It provides a comprehensive platform for parents to follow activity guidelines for the various stages of their child's development. Developed with the principles of both AMI (Association Montessori Internationale) and AMS (American Montessori Society), Montibaby offers activities and guidelines for all parents, regardless of their experience with the Montessori Method

Currently, access to Montessori pedagogy for the average parent can be challenging and confusing. Parents interested in raising their baby the Montessori way run into some problems:

Montessori isn’t copyrighted, which means anyone can call something “Montessori” without it coming from the philosophy. https://hechingerreport.org/will-the-real-montessori-please-stand-up/

There are no commercial manuals on the market for public access, only guides that go through training that have hand written manuals. https://www.maitrilearning.com/blogs/montessori-pedagogy/montessori-manuals-and-albums

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A user-friendly app that will empower parents to practice Montessori principles at home and support their baby's development with easy-to-follow instructions and comprehensive information on Montessori activities. Parents can confidently raise their child with a focus on grace, courtesy, and respect from the comfort of their own home

I conducted interviews, surveys, and a competitive analysis to develop my understanding of what apps or methods parents are currently using for activities with their babies, and where there are current gaps.

I started the research by exploring current mobile applications on the market that offer activities and milestone trackers. I focused on the organization of the apps and their ease of use.

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Well organized and easy to navigate.

Activities, milestones, and abilities sections.

Daily program and activities.

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Daily calendar diary.

Challenging to find activities that aren’t on today’s plan.

Shows skills and future skills, coaching, and community.

Partnered with Lovevery

I conducted user surveys with 27 participants and interviewed 3 participants to learn about their motivators, pain points, and needs. The participants were parents of young children between birth to 3 years old, and were familiar with Montessori.

As a result of the research, I gathered four key insights that I used to guide the project:

Many parents feel like they don’t have time to look for activities, and need something easy to follow and simple to learn to reduce time spent.

Milestones are important for parents to ensure their child is reaching them, but they can also cause stress and anxiety if the child isn’t reaching them.

Parents want to assist their children in development, but they don't always know how, or have the tools to do so.

After gathering data, the next step was to determine how the app would be set up. Once signed in, the user would start on the home page. From there, the user can access an explore page to browse all the activities by age and activity type, saved activities, and profile.

I stepped into the user’s shoes to help me visualize. I designed the flow to better capture their process of how they will interact with the interface.

Welcome

Home

Explore

Profile

I designed two activity pages. The first had a “rate” button for the user to rate the activity as mastered or too difficult, with an overlay. The second didn’t have an overlay or button, instead only a “mastered” toggle for the user to select once their child masters the activity.

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I started with a color palette utilizing the primary colors, red and blue. Many traditional Montessori materials utilize red and blue. The colors were very bold and bright, so I decided to soften the palette and implemented green to add the natural element that is used in Montessori classrooms.

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The logo is derived from a traditional Montessori baby material, the Gobbi mobile. I went through a few design steps and iterations to get to the final logo design.

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Two task flows were tested by four participants- Signing up and Finding an activity.

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Onboarding

In app

This project taught me important aspects of creating an app from start to finish, including designing, visual design, organizing, and researching. When I was coming up with the idea for the app, it was simple to think of the idea and research the wants and needs of users. When it came time to plan and organize the actual design of the app, it was the most challenging. There was so much I wanted to include in the app. Montessori is a very wide pedagogy, with a lot of information. I had to find a way to simplify 6 manuals worth of information into an easy-to-use app and prioritize the most important elements to include, first. Keeping it simple while still having enough information for the user was the most challenging. **Seeing the finished design come to life was very rewarding, and being able to connect my background in Montessori education with UX design came full circle into this project.