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Design a toothbrush for young children.

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User Segment – Young Children – Assumption for the question will be that there are two main groups:

Children who haven’t brushed their teeth before (make experience as easy as possible)

Children who have brushed their teeth before, but struggle to keep the habit (make experience as fun as possible)

2. Outcome/Goal – Prevent cavities/keep teeth white/spend at least the medically recommended time of brushing your teeth 2-3x a day for 1-2 minutes.

3. Pain Points

  • No immediate reward
  • Seen as a chore before a reward (sleep/breakfast)
  • Toothpaste doesn’t taste good/incorrect technique can be painful
  • Electric toothbrushes make noise and can be scary to young children
  • Monotonous task

Toothbrush design goals:

1. Eliminate electric toothbrush noise (why electric – proven to be easy to brush and more effective than manual toothbrushes. Also, if you design a usable child electric toothbrush, they will transition easier to another electric toothbrush later on in life easily).
2. Offer a simple short term reward for the child to enjoy brushing their teeth based on psychology (could be a variety of sounds, streak with colors on the toothbrush)
3. Ability to time how long the brushing is supposed to be with sound (to get to medically alloted amount) in a fun way.
Toothbrush design ideas:
1. 1 and 3 can be resolved together – either play a sound with the toothbrush that masks the noise of the whirr and plays the sound for exactly a minute. This is mostly for the child to create a habit; offer ability to turn it off so it doesn’t get repetitive after a month or so (21 days habit theory).
Larger idea – allow connection to parent’s phone to play a snippet of song that the child likes for only a minute while they brush their teeth or have a ticking “time” bomb to “race” to the finish.
2. While the reward could be getting to listen to music, there could also be physical attributes to the toothbrush that give some sort of reward (think tracking or tasking streaks) on a weekly basis (7/7 day streak!) through a line of colors on the grip of the toothbrush.
3. Make the toothbrush as ergonomic as possible for small hands to manuever or reduce the necessity to even use their hands (radical design) or use fabric/material that children love.

Understanding the question: I need to design a toothbrush that is dedicated for young children.

Clarity questions:

1. Do we have a specific goal? Increase revenue?  Train kids to brush their teeth? Assuming to Sell more units.

2. What are the ages of te children? They grow a lot in those ages. Assuming for 3-5.

3. Have we launched toothbrushes in the past? Were they for adults? Assuming that we have.

4. Are we designing an electric toothbrush or a regular one?

5. Is it globally or is there a specific country that we’re aiming for? Let’s assume that for the U.S.

So who are audience?

1. Kids in that age that have a very strict parents that are already used to brush their teeth.

2. Kids that are not fond of brushing and don’t like to brush.

3. Kids that do brush their teeth but aren’t good at it.

I’ll prioritize as: 2, 3, 1

What’s the pain points:

1. The action of brushing is not fun, and annoying

2. They don’t like the taste of the tooshpaste

3. They forget

4. They don’t see the point of brushing

Prioritizing: 1, 4, 3, 2

HL solutions:

1. A gamification in the brush. The electric brush will be made as an cartoon character and after using it for a specific time, the cartoon will change to a different cartoon with white teeth.

2. Connecting to a doll that the kid sleeps with, and every night in a specific time after motion was seen then it says “don’t forget to brush your teeth” or different sentences.

3. Creating a doll that have white teeth and everytime that they miss to brush their own teeth, the dolls teeth changes color (until you brush her teeth).

Prioritizing: 1, 2, 3

If I’m getting into detail on the first solution, we need to see how to change the cartoon between a “bad character” to a good one. Every 5 hours the character changes to a “bad” character and after 40 seconds of using the brush, it will change.

We need to think of the material, the fit for the kids mouth.

That’s how I would design a toothbrush for kids.