How Parenthood Changed the Way I See UX…

Becoming a parent is a crash course in human-centred design. Infants are the ultimate “users”: they cannot read instructions, they have no patience for learning curves, and they certainly don’t care about features. Their needs are immediate, their feedback brutally direct. Feed me. Change me. Comfort me. Anything that delays or confuses is not just bad design — it feels like failure.

Take the baby monitor. Many of the newest models come packed with Wi-Fi integrations, night-vision filters, and companion apps. But at 3 a.m., fumbling in the dark, none of that matters. What matters is one big, tactile button that simply works. This is Hick’s Law in action: the more options we present, the slower the decision. Parents don’t have the luxury of being slow. And neither do most users.

Cognitive load theory also comes alive in parenthood. With a baby screaming in one arm, your working memory is already at capacity. A poorly labelled icon or a hidden setting can tip you from coping to failure. Good design reduces cognitive load by chunking information, using recognition instead of recall, and revealing complexity only when necessary. Parenthood made me see how rare this is. Too often, our products assume a calm, focused user. But real life — whether parenting, commuting, or working under stress — demands designs that perform under distraction.

Time perception changes too. A five-second app delay feels trivial when you’re relaxed, but unbearable when every second means a louder baby. In design terms, that’s about perceived latency. Research shows that even small lags erode trust and patience. Parenthood taught me this viscerally: wasted time is not neutral — it is costly.

The stroller is another case study. Some strollers fold with one hand, others require three steps and both arms. Guess which ones parents buy again, and which ones end up gathering dust. That’s Fitts’s Law in practice: the effort to complete a task directly influences adoption. Technology products follow the same rule. The harder it is to do something basic, the faster users abandon it.

Perhaps the biggest lesson parenthood offers designers is humility. Babies don’t reward cleverness. They reward clarity. They don’t tolerate “delight” that gets in the way of function. They remind us that usability is not about what a product *can* do, but what it enables people to do in their most difficult moments.

We often measure success by engagement, clicks, or retention. Parenthood reframed that for me. The true metric of good design is how little it asks of us when we have nothing left to give. That is not just good parenting design. It is good design, full stop.