Dr. Browns Natural Flow Baby Bottles Critique

Dr. Browns Natural Flow Baby Bottles

Colic can be a nightmare for some parents, this is why Handi Craft invented their patented designed Dr. Brown’s baby bottles. These bottles have a vent and a straw that prevents the creation of air bubbles. The potential air is vented through the hole in the side of the vent, and pushed through the straw away from the baby’s mouth. This vent also prevents the nipple of the bottle from suctioning together which, gives the liquid a constant natural flow, as if the baby were being breastfed.

I first heard of this product when my cousin had her child, about a year before my baby was born. I was actually told by another cousin, to let her know that if she is experiencing colic with her baby to try Dr. Brown’s baby bottles. Both of my cousins work in the medical field, and I therefore kept the Dr. Browns name in the back of my head for future reference.

I didn’t really do any research on bottles before buying the full set of Dr. Brown’s bottles, I just went with the word of mouth suggestion. These bottles are quite expensive (approximately ten dollars for an eight ounce bottle) so I decided to wait until they went on sale to purchase a set. The purchased set included; four, four ounce bottles, two, eight ounce bottles, one, two ounce bottle, a bottle warmer, soother holder and two orthodontic soother’s for $70 taxes included.

When my little Dionne was born, I opened the box and prepared the bottles for formula. I received a few other sets of bottles at my baby shower, I opened those as well. I didn’t quite realize how well the bottle worked, until, I ran out of bottles one day and decided to use a Tommy Tipee bottle. I saw that some of my other cousins used this type of bottle and I didn’t think anything of giving it to my daughter. The experience was awful, the nipple of the bottle kept suctioning together and I would have to pull the bottle out of Dionne’s mouth to enable her to keep the liquid flowing. Then, there would be bubbles that formed in the bottle which, led to tummy aches for my little one.

Now that Dionne is older she is able to hold her bottle and the Dr. Brown’s bottles are the perfect size for her little hands. They are easy to fit in the sides of a baby bag, unlike some of the other bottles and they come with a cap you can screw on the top to prevent leaks when traveling.  Alongside being a great product, this bottle also helps in retaining vitamins A, D and E. The tiny bubbles created when the nipple of the bottle suctions together, oxidize those nutrients and prevents the baby from gaining the full potential of the vitamins in breast milk and or formula.

As you can see these bottles are a bit awkward shaped and therefore needed to be sterilized in a special Dr. Brown’s microwave sterilizer. This unit costs approximately $20-$40 depending on whether it is on sale, bought from a retail store or from the internet.

The bottles come apart into 7 pieces including the lid and the leak proof seal. This make cleaning time a little less fun. The bottles come with their own cleaner which, looks like a pipe cleaner for the straw inside as well as the tip of the air guard.

On the side of the bottle is guide lines on where to fill the bottles, at the top of these lines is a leak guard line. If you fill the bottle past that line the contents may spill out. This has definitely happened to me a few times. Being a tired new mom and a full time student, doesn’t help when you are half asleep filling up a bottle.

Although you have to purchase the sterilizer for this bottle separately, they are little hard to clean, costly and leaky when not filled properly or when the leak proof cap isn’t used, I would recommend this bottle to any new mom, it has definitely been a life saver for us.

Website Critique

Website critique

Background Information:

BabyCenter_Logo 

Http://www.babycenter.com/ is a great go to website, for tips and information for new and expectant parents. This website has valuable information for any parent of children varying in age, from in utero, to approximately age ten. Some of this information includes product recalls, nutritional information, advice and support, pregnancy facts week by week and many other useful tools.

A great feature of the website is the email newsletters. Once the user has signed up for weekly emails, the website takes their information and generates an email based on the child/fetus’s age. In the emails, users can find details on parenting tips for various stages and age ranges for infants. These tips includes information like, when to stop feeding certain foods and for the pregnant mothers it sends weekly updates of the fetus’s growth patterns.

Arrangement

This website is unsuccessful at achieving suitable, eye catching arrangement. At first glance this website looks extremely cluttered. There is a lot of information coming at the reader in all different forms of content. There are videos on the right side of the screen and two tool bars at the top of the screen which appears to be dynamic. This can be overwhelming, especially for a new mother, who is seeking out advice and tips on caring for a newborn. Every link on the page seems to be clustered at the top and as you scroll down, there appears to be white space nearing the “more tools” and “contact us” section.

Emphasis

 

When looking at this website you can tell that the designer is emphasizing the tools that help parents in calculating various things, the support blogs and the video of the week. These items have a fairly large heading in comparison to the font in the tool bars and they are grey in contrast to the white background. The video of the week is fairly large and is eye catching because the definition is different from the pictures on the rest of the screen.

Clarity

 

This website isn’t very clear. There is a lot of clutter on the screen and it is, seemingly hard to navigate. The designer attempts to create on screen clarity by, putting boxes around the content to frame it. This just groups the information in a non-definitive order. If the website had listed the content in alphabetical order it would have improved the clarity.

 

Conciseness

 

The website designer was very concise when it comes to: the grey scale in the headings on the page, the boxes around the featured text, bold in the font in the tools section and the green blue and white color scheme. The issue is that, the elaborate design in this website, slows down the usability and restricts users who would want to move quickly through the information.

Tone

 

The tone of this website is visually frenetic, there is a lot going on, on the page at once. The designer seems to be more interested in emphasizing the tools on the page, than the information. The underlying tone is professional. The authors of this website want to deliver the most professional, up-to-date medical information, available and you can see this in their wording.

Ethos

 

The “babycenter” website has the look and feel of a magazine. They are targeting women who predominantly read magazines by, adding tools and quizzes to give the website a trusting vibe. Women who grew up reading magazines as their primary source of information, will be drawn to this website just by its design layout. They will in turn, trust the content of the website as they have trusted the content of so many magazines over the years, therefore building ethos.

Gestalt Principles

 

The following table explains how the http://www.babycenter.com designers incorporate the Gestalt Principles in their design.

 

Principle How babycenter.com Incorporates the principle
Figure-Ground Contrast This principle is predominantly shown in the framing of the content on the website. The frame makes the content stick out from the background showing importance. The darker tone enhances the white field in the background
Degrading Figure-Ground with Visual Noise The visual noise in this website occurs towards the bottom of the page, where you see lists and advertisements. The web designers purposely put white space in-between the content of the page and the visual noise to enhance the contents in the framed boxes.
Grouping The grey boxes around the content, fences off one group from another on the page. Although there is a list of tools at the bottom of the page, the most significant titles are grouped and sectioned off by grey frames. The closure of the text creates cohesion.
Patterns: Creating Groups Across the Communication The layout of this website is a large pattern. The tools and advice topics are bolded in an aquamarine color. The important headings are portrayed in dark grey color. The advertisements are colored in green. Any type of “go”, “join now”, “go, calculate” or search buttons, is in a green color.

 Visual Language Matrix

 

Below is a model of the visual language matrix which incorporates the four levels of design and the three coding modes. This matrix is filled out in accordance to the applicable information visible on http://www.babycenter.com.

  Textual Spatial Graphic
Intra ·         Plain Type Style

·         12 point font

·         Normal spacing between characters ·         Punctuation marks
Inter ·         Hyperlinks ·         Two clearly visible margins on the left and right side of the page

 

·         Text boxes surrounding important text

·         Aquamarine colored hyperlinks

Extra ·         Captions for Visuals ·         In the center of the page the picture size for the three links are the same size ·         Pictures are detailed

·         Pictures are in color

·         Use of color for data displays

Supra ·         Navigational Bars

·         Section Headings

·         Initial letters signaling the start of an article and major text segments

·         Page is a scrollable length

·         Portrait landscape

·         Placement of the data and pictures are visually appealing

·         Use of color scheme in text

·         Grey Scales around articles, pictures and videos

·