Ajay

Ajay is a personal baby tracking app I created after the birth of my son, designed to make important care information quick to record and easy to recall later.

Project: Ajay
Role: Designer and Developer
Area: Baby tracking and parental reassurance
Status: Live personal side project

Snapshot

Problem: Sleep deprivation makes it difficult to remember important information about feeds, nappies, medication, and sleep when it is needed later.
Users: New parents, particularly those caring for newborn babies.
Goal: Provide a fast and low-cognitive-load way to record important baby events and quickly answer questions about recent activity.
Outcome: Created a focused baby tracker designed around recording information quickly, sharing it between parents, and making it easy to review when needed.

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Questions driving the project

What I needed to understand

What information do parents need to record most often?
How can logging be completed with as little effort as possible?
What information is most useful when speaking to health visitors?
How can the experience work well during night feeds and night wakings?

What I needed to validate

Would a smaller set of focused actions be more useful than a feature-rich tracker?
Could shared family access reduce the pressure on one parent to remember everything?
Would a calmer interface feel easier to use during night-time care?

Challenge

Real context

The app had to work during night feeds, sleep deprivation, and moments where attention was already stretched.

I wanted Ajay to focus on a few main abilities so it did not overwhelm my wife or me during 3am feeds and night wakings.

The goal was not to find patterns or predict what would happen next.

It was to record what had happened quickly, without visually stimulating images or unnecessary distractions, so we could answer questions from health visitors or look back over the last 24 to 48 hours with confidence.

Research

Methods

Personal experience caring for a newborn
Observation of day-to-day tracking needs
Reviewing existing baby tracking apps

Key insights

Parents are often using the app while tired or distracted.
Night-time use requires a simple and calm interface.
Most tracking revolves around a small number of repeated activities.
Parents often need to recall information from the last 24 to 48 hours.
Speed is more important than detailed analytics.

Hypotheses

If logging is quick and simple, parents will use it more consistently.
If information is easy to review, parents will feel more confident when answering questions about their baby's wellbeing.
If the interface avoids unnecessary distractions, it will feel easier to use during night-time care.
If sleep patterns can be presented as gentle guidance rather than strict prediction, parents may feel better prepared for the next nap.

Product direction

Create a focused experience centred around reassurance rather than analytics.
Reduce the effort required to record information.
Prioritise the most common parenting activities.
Make information easy to review when questions arise.
Explore sleep prediction as a future layer that helps parents build routines without making the product feel controlling.

Core flows

Fast care logging

Parents needed to record common events quickly while tired, distracted, or holding the baby.

Prioritised breastfeeding timers, bottle tracking, nappy logging, sleep, medication, and notes.
Kept the core actions close to hand rather than burying them in menus.
Focused the interface on recording the event rather than interpreting it.

Naming and identity

The brand needed to feel personal without narrowing the product to maternity, breastfeeding, or one specific parent role.

Named the app Ajay after my son, Archie John.
Designed the logo as a stylised jay bird that also subtly forms a lower-case a.
Chose a bird mark because it felt more neutral, ownable, and scalable than a mother-and-baby icon.
Used the identity to connect the personal origin of the app with a calmer, broader product direction.

Shared family tracking

Care was shared between parents, so the record needed to be shared too.

Supported shared family accounts so both parents could contribute to the same history.
Made activity history easy to review when questions came up.
Reduced the need for one parent to remember or relay every update manually.

Health visitor summary

When a health visitor asks what has happened in the last 24 hours, parents need a clear answer without mentally searching through the day.

Turned recent activity into plain sentences rather than a dense report.
Summarised feeds, nappies, sleep, and the most recent events in a way parents could read back quickly.
Designed the summary to reduce pressure in moments where parents may feel judged, tired, or unsure.

Day and night use

The app needed to work during night feeds and night wakings without feeling visually noisy.

Included day and night modes for different care contexts.
Avoided unnecessary imagery and decorative distraction.
Kept the experience calm, functional, and quick to operate.

Real-use product decisions

The app changed because real use exposed real problems that only appeared once it was being used during actual newborn care.

Added breastfeeding side tracking, then made side switching record the exact time it happened.
Excluded pauses from feeding time so the summary reflected active feeding rather than elapsed time.
Avoided treating a feed that started on the right breast as a switch.
Adjusted sleep tracking so wake periods and breastfeeding during sleep were handled correctly.
Added manual start times for the moments when a timer was started late.
Added delete confirmations because logs mattered and accidental removal created anxiety.
Made summaries human-readable rather than just a set of numbers.

Future sleep guidance

Once reliable sleep data exists, the next opportunity is helping parents anticipate when the next nap might happen without turning the app into a rigid schedule.

Explored predicting the next likely sleep window from recent patterns.
Framed the feature around building a routine that works for everyone rather than chasing perfect analytics.
Positioned guidance as a way to prevent overtiredness and reduce avoidable meltdowns.
Kept the tone supportive, helping parents learn patterns and feel more like a baby whisperer.

Iteration

What did not work

Adding features because other baby trackers had them risked making the product harder to use.
Detailed analytics did not support the main need for quick recall and reassurance.
Visual stimulation worked against the realities of night-time care.
Early timer logic was too simple for the reality of feeding, pausing, switching sides, and tracking sleep interruptions.

What changed

Evaluated features against whether they made tracking faster or more reassuring.
Kept the product centred on a small set of repeated parenting activities.
Avoided features that added complexity without improving day-to-day care.
Used my wife's real usage to identify friction that would not have appeared in a speculative prototype.
Refined the event model so feeds, pauses, side switches, wake periods, and manual start times matched what actually happened.

Impact

Created a tool that supported day-to-day newborn care.
Reduced the mental effort required to remember important information.
Made recent care activity easier to share and review between parents.
Helped parents answer health visitor questions without relying on memory alone.
Turned everyday friction into product decisions that made the tracker more trustworthy in real use.
Opened up a future direction around sleep guidance, routine building, and preventing overtiredness.

Outcome

Focused the app around reassurance rather than analytics
Supported shared tracking between parents
Made common care events faster to record and review

Ajay became a practical tool for recording baby care in the moments where memory, attention, and energy were limited.
The value was not in predicting behaviour, but in reducing the burden of remembering and helping parents answer important questions with less pressure.

Reflection

Designing for exhausted users requires a different mindset.
The goal was not to create the most feature-rich baby tracking app.
The goal was to create something fast, functional, and easy to use when energy and attention were limited.
The name and logo helped make the product feel personal without making the audience feel too narrow.
The health visitor summary showed that reporting is not neutral. The right summary can reduce pressure in a moment where parents may feel judged, tired, or unsure.
Sleep prediction would need to be handled carefully: useful enough to reduce uncertainty, but gentle enough not to make parents feel they had failed when real life did not follow the pattern.

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