BabySteps

In early 2019 I joined in a coding bootcamp, because I desired to know better the development world that surrounded me throughout my entire career as a designer. I chose to get in a course of Le Wagon, intensive 9-week experience with students from around the world. Le Wagon is the best coding bootcamp of the world according to SwitchUp and Course Report.

After the first weeks, all the students had to pitch a product proposal and the best ones would be selected to be developed by the groups in the last weeks of the bootcamp. I proposed an app for first-time parents that could log a baby's routine in an easy way and share it with a pediatrician or a physician. My proposal was selected.

With the groups defined by the teachers, the next steps were reviewing the pitch, creating a persona, and defining her/his main user journey to guide the app development. Our scope was developing an app for 30-40 carioca first-time fathers, who needed to log and track the baby's routine, and wanted to share it with doctors in an easy way. We called it BabySteps.

From this point, my colleagues and I gathered to define the technical details and features we would develop to assure that our MVP provided a good experience through our persona's main journey: checking the baby's temperature during a fever episode, medicating her/him, and saving that information in the middle of the night. With those features agreed among the group, I focused on the UX and UI of the project: a branding that talked with the persona, a responsive interface structure that could deliver a good experience for mobile and desktop devices, and very simple interactions and user flows aiming scenarios where the attention was on taking care of the child, not in using the app.

For the last two weeks, a period reserved for coding the product, I was accountable for the front-end coding, part of the job where I could collaborate more. Having absorbed the front-end demand allowed the rest of the team to take a lot of other tasks from the backlog beyond our MVP's scope, such as charts of baby's height and weight, and the PWA version of the app, becoming its usage more convenient in smartphones.

The result was a functional and accessible app that allows for account registration, having one or more children per profile, log, and edition of eight different types of episodes (diaper changing, feeding, crying, medication, fever, vomiting, bruise, and others), access to episodes log, height and weight charts, sharing feature for pediatricians or hospitals, in addition to a landing page to promote the product. The bootcamp ended with a demo day when I presented BabySteps for an audience formed by students, professionals, and businesspeople. The platform isn't currently hosted on any server, but I've turned the project public. It can be checked in its GitHub repository.

If you dream of learning to code and becoming a developer in a few weeks, I strongly recommend you visit lewagon.com. It is a life-changing experience.