Assembly is an early stage start-up on a mission to help parents and carers support their children’s emotional and behavioural development through a unique skill-building programme. I worked with Assembly in 2023 and 2024 as a UX and product consultant, creating several complex Figma prototypes and running research studies with parents of young children. The insights we uncovered allowed us to put a fully functional product in the hands of our users, leading to a wealth of learnings and a fundamental shift in product strategy.

First learnings: streamline onboarding and communicate value early on

I joined the team at the end of a pilot in which parents engaged with a draft version of Assembly’s skill-building programme via a closed WhatsApp group. Learnings from the pilot allowed us to map out and interrogate the first potential user journey, which in turn generated several hypotheses about how the product should behave.

We noted that:

• capturing the user’s goals during onboarding would be critical in understanding our target customer and the user’s relationship with the app
• to help parents stay on track with the learning programme, we would need some at least a basic notifications from the get-go
• showing the app's impact on parents’ skills over time would be essential to conveying its value.

The team also wanted parents to design their bespoke learning programme by first determining their parenting “superpowers” and practice areas. We made the assumption that the superpowers assessment should sit as a required part of the onboarding, rather than later in the journey. One of my challenges was to communicate the results of the assessment in a way that was clear, engaging and offered a clear value-add. After some friends-and-family testing, we chose the fourth option from the screens below.

Testing Assembly’s value messaging and onboarding flow

We soon had a testable prototype — which meant it was time to recruit and speak to some prospective users.

Working with the founder and the rest of the team, I pulled together a study screener and our research questions. With the first cohort of parents recruited, we set out to validate the messaging around our value proposition and the first version of the prototype.

Gathering feedback on the onboarding prototype

Fresh insights and a more complex prototype

The interviews yielded insights that would prove critical for the future shape of the product:

• parents told us they would struggle to commit time to a skill-building programme without in-the-moment support for when behavioural issues arose
• seeing patterns in their child’s behaviour was critical in observing impact of behavioural adjustments and Assembly’s programme
• the Superpowers assessment, although valuable, felt long, cumbersome and didn’t take the child’s perspective into account
• part of Assembly’s programme included parent-child games (so-called “Challenges”). We found logistical and behavioural challenges with getting children to engage with these.

Off the back of the research findings, the team made several important calls on where to steer the product next:

• we made the parent-child games optional
• we broke down the Superpowers assessment into easier to digest sections
• we introduced a basic set of “in-the-moment” scripts for dealing with difficult behaviours
• we added a basic mood tracker to help parents understand their children’s behavioural triggers and changes in meltdowns over time

Measurement plan and Mixpanel integration

The first fully functional version of the product was built as a “scrappy” web app, which would allow us to test those parts of the Assembly experience that relied on usage and adoption over time.

To help us learn from real users, the app would need a robust analytics configuration. To make sure we were collecting the right level of detail, I put together together a measurement plan loosely based on Google’s HEART framework. The plan helped us understand what we would be measuring, why we’re measuring it and how we would know when we’ve been successful. Metrics included classic product KPIs like DAU and MAU, as well as value moments unique to Assembly’s product such as programme sessions completed and instances of difficult behaviours tracked.

Analytics can only give us so much, which is why we added a feedback form to the app and continued with further interviews, this time by recruiting real users.

First flurry of real user activity

It was rewarding to see some of the changes and additions to the product being validated with real, unmoderated user behaviour. Mixpanel and user feedback told us parents were sailing through the onboarding and engaging with the newly added in-the-moment tantrum scripts. The behavioural tracking tools proved less engaging due in part, as we found through some additional usability testing, a fragmented and unclear UI.

As of 2024, Assembly continues to onboard parents into the programme through a series of popular expert webinars, gaining deeper understanding of parents’ needs along the way.