How Crowdtesting Helps VersaMe Turn Parents Into Teachers

All parents know that young children are always listening. That quizzical look on a new-born’s face? Listening. A constant barrage of questions during the terrible twos and threes? Driven by listening.

Pediatric research has shown that 90% of brain growth happens before a child reaches the age of five, with the spoken word a critical part of that child’s development. We may not remember how much we learned when we were children, but our parents were the people that taught us the words that developed our language skills.

So, how can a parent know how many words a child has heard? San Francisco-based VersaMe has the answer.

VersaMe’s Starling is a wearable device that has been designed to mirror a child’s early development from baby to infant to toddler to pre-school. Parents set a word goal for the day (kind of like step-counting) which tracks the number of words spoken to that child.

The Bluetooth-paired wearable allows parents to follow their child’s progress through the day, thanks to the companion smartphone app that not only provides data on word learning abilities but also determines what is and is not actual speech.

As you would expect from a company that is at the heart of a child’s early development, VersaMe needed to make sure that Starling had seamless functionality. First impressions mean everything in the modern app economy, even more so when you have a product that will come into contact with both parent and child.

Feedback Is The Key To Successful Product Management

According to VersaMe’s program and product manager Alexandra Yorke, the challenge was to ensure that all of Starling’s “moving parts”—hardware and software—worked in harmony from day one.

“These are parents using the app. We don’t want them spending their time trying to work around a bug,” said Yorke, “We want them engaging with their children, so it is really important to us that they have a smooth experience the first time they launch the app onwards.”

With a small internal QA team, Yorke knew that a third-party option could deliver focused feedback on both the device itself and the iOS and Android versions of VersaMe’s app. This would become even more important as the smartphone app evolved over time.