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Peeko Product Testing with Parents

Thus far, we’ve gone through about three weeks of testing with the Peeko. When we started, we knew we’d likely have some significant bugs, particularly around Wi-Fi connectivity. And, lo-and-behold, we did, and we saw a few other major mechanical bugs (battery life and the on/off switch to name two) as well as some software and server side issues. All of that said, we still managed to get a lot of fantastic data that is enabling us to significantly improve our algorithms. In the end, we got a solid, and surprisingly consistent, bug list that has given us a very specific list of improvements as we work through our next redesign.

And, the parents we worked with gave us wonderful feedback about their interaction and experience with Peeko, from turtle shape to onesie design to app feature set. A few of the major things we learned along the way:

• Simplify, simplify. Parents love anything that saves time or makes their life easier. A great example of this is the on/off switch—one of the biggest problems was that parents couldn’t immediately tell what was on and what was off. So, we’re redesigning the entire power on/off process to make it simple and super easy.
• Focus, focus. It was fascinating to see how different parents valued different types of data. Depending on how old their infant was or how many children in the family, parents assigned significantly different values to breathing data, body position, skin temperature, or overall activity levels. What this taught us is that we should indeed be focusing on each of these factors, but that we in turn need to focus on executing perfectly on each of them. Figuring out how to intuitively visualize respiration is going to be huge in terms of helping parents understand what they’re seeing, and we’re working on testing a few different options.

We have a lot of industrial design work to do, and there are a ton of variables to think about in terms of design: the shape of the turtle, the type of material we use for the shell, what surface coating we select, color, everything. Ensuring that the turtle is super-durable while also being soft and super-cute is a challenge we’re excited to work on.

We are incredibly fortunate, however, in that we have worked with incredible families thus far. The moms and dads’ that we’ve worked with have been incredibly specific, responsive, and supportive for Peeko and our team, and we are so thankful for their insight and feedback. Our goal is always to tailor Peeko to what parent’s actually want and need, so having a group of rockstar test parents is key to helping us do that.

Ultimately, we’ll be going through at least three more rounds of product design and testing, and our sample sizes will get larger and larger to enable exceptional confidence. We can’t wait to get another version out with parents again—if you’re interested in being a test family for Peeko, please email Dulcie (dmadden@restdevices.com).