Designing for one hand and no sleep

How having a baby impacted my digital experiences

I wanted to get this story down while it was still fresh. I had my second child last November, and the last 10 months seem to have zipped by. There was something different about my experience with my second than with my first — things I noticed more, or maybe it was just because I now had the demands of two children instead of one. Moments when I really wanted to focus on my baby suddenly became opportunities for admin or other tasks.

I suspect most parents, like myself, ignore most usability issues or accept them as part of having a baby. Never having more than one hand free at a time (if you’re lucky), being tired all the time, the constant emotional and physical demands. It is, well… a lot. Everything feels hard, and digital experiences only add to it.

I had a limitation, and I’d been living with it. Oftentimes, I blamed myself when I didn’t necessarily deserve it. I’m lucky that neither of my pregnancies involved any medical issues that could impair my vision, cause inflammation, or cause mild tremors. So my limitations probably track along the baseline for new parents. Any additional needs would stack on top of those.

Microsoft’s Inclusive Design Toolkit lists a new parent as a type of situational disability (Microsoft, n.d.). This applies to new mums and dads, adoptive parents, and other carers. In this article, I’ll break down the two sides of my own experiences as a new mum and the areas that impacted me most.

Mental & Emotional tax

When I became a mum the first time, there was a lot of talk about postpartum depression or even the temporary “baby blues” that we can experience thanks to the sudden and rapid change in hormone levels following a birth. I thought I knew what to look for and what to expect, but it wasn’t until several years later that I realised how broad the symptoms can be. Even without the postpartum depression aspect, there are times when your brain doesn’t feel like your own. I can honestly say the person I was before my first baby was not the person I was after. I know there were biological reasons for the shift, but there has been a part of me that always felt like it was a type of brainwashing. I’m still not entirely sure if I did suffer from any postpartum depression or if all of this is just “normal”.

My emotions didn’t use to run as high as they do now. I can’t get through The Snail and the Whale without choking up. Ever heard of “mom rage”? It’s described as sudden, intense episodes of anger linked to powerlessness, stress, and overwhelm (McNelis, 2025), commonly referred to in my house as “shouty mummy”.

I felt a lot more susceptible to deceptive UX patterns. Of course I should buy that item; it’ll keep my baby safe. If I don’t buy it, I clearly don’t care about my baby at all. Confirmshaming and urgency timers are really effective on someone who’s already emotionally raw. Constant notifications added to my already stressed and overtaxed system.

Physical

If I was lucky, I might have one hand free during a feed or when I was acting as a bed. I ended up relying mostly on my phone, which isn’t always easy for certain tasks. When I did try to use anything with a keyboard, I had to find somewhere to prop it up and then type one-handed. Re-editing messages because of typos or accidentally ordering two of something was fairly common. When you are stuck under a baby, these are sometimes your only lifeline to the rest of the world — or the only way to make sure you don’t fall asleep as well.

Phones aren’t the best shape to keep a hold of on their own, and they frequently fall either out of reach or sometimes onto your sleeping baby. In addition, my overreliance on my mobile phone, constant holding, bouncing, and repetitive movements led to chronic upper back, neck, and wrist pain. Every extra tap, stretch, or scroll added up.

Impact on User Experience

While the emotional and physical impact of maternity might all make sense, it’s worth breaking down what symptoms impacted my digital experience while looking after my new baby.

Social validation. It’s no exaggeration that I spent a lot of time scouring through reviews. I was already under heightened social pressure, but add hundreds of positive reviews to that, and I felt I needed every must-have baby product. I knew if I asked my husband for his opinion, he would have said I didn’t need it — so I wouldn’t ask him. I was more susceptible to deceptive patterns like fake urgency, confirmshaming, and fake reviews.

Duplicate purchases. The added cognitive load of looking after a little one, coupled with my inability to actually move, meant I often bought things we already had. I didn’t always have time to look through clothes or the fridge. I was often left with 3 cartons of milk and sets of baby clothes worn only a few times before they were outgrown, even though I was certain we needed them.

Rushed decisions. Time is always a factor. So sometimes my decisions weren’t well thought out. I like to mull things over normally — rethink the wording of that email, or cut down on the items in my shopping cart before committing. Instead, I did a lot of things in a rush.

Memory lapses. I had to remember how many feeds, dirty nappies, and naps my baby was doing — on top of my regular remembering to make dinner, do the laundry, bring money for the bake sale… I’d spend time trawling through message apps and emails trying to figure out where I was supposed to drop my oldest child off for an outing, or which day was dress-up day.

Sleep deprivation. The NHS notes that regular poor sleep can leave you tired, irritable or less able to cope (NHS, 2026). When you’re a new parent, the sleepless nights stack up day after day with no end in sight. Making decisions or remembering if I turned the stove off is hard enough. Trying to read through walls of text often left me frustrated and drained. At the same time, I needed to stay awake while holding my baby, but be ready to fall back asleep as soon as I could put him down. That’s easier said than done when you start feeling anxious or worried about something.

Abandoned tasks. When interruptions are frequent, I’d often find myself taking hours to return to a task I had started. Often, that meant starting over. Progress is rarely saved, and neither are delivery slots for groceries I need tomorrow but can’t get until Friday.

Errors. Either from me typing one-handed, or because a baby’s hand randomly swung out and made contact with my phone. I needed to undo, redo, or fix a lot of errors. These will only increase now that my baby is a bit older, and those random arm swings are now intentional grabs for my phone.

Design principles to help new parents

I won’t pretend any amount of UX can make parenting easier. It’s one of the hardest and most rewarding experiences I’ve had. But you can improve some predictable challenges as a baseline for accessible usability.

Use clear, plain language. Communicate information, choices, and consequences clearly.Avoid walls of text or overly complex language that requires a certain level of knowledge to understand.

Shorten workflows and include skip options. Make it as easy as possible for a user to complete a workflow. If you do want to add optional steps, make sure a skip option is featured prominently — not at the end of a long scrolling list of “did you want to add these?”.

Error recovery. Make it easy to cancel, back out, or change. Use helper text to explain the issue and how to fix it. For example, after check-out, include an option to cancel the order within a reasonable grace period, in case a little one hits the screen by accident.

Flexible task timers. Let users save and resume a task without starting over; if there is a timeout, warn them and let them extend the time. There’s nothing worse than filling a shopping cart full of things I spent ages finding, only to come back when I finally find a free moment to an empty cart.

Design for more than one interaction type. Make it easy to use if one or both hands are compromised. I’ve even had to use the back of my hand or nose on occasion. Voice is sometimes an option, but not when you’ve got a sleeping baby. So don’t use voice as a replacement for one-handed usability. Make sure you have thumb-reachable controls (hand sizes and phone sizes vary), large touch targets, and no drag-only or two-finger gestures. Being able to copy codes, passwords, or information between apps or devices is also incredibly helpful when you’re sleep-deprived.

Night-time-friendly options. True dark themes and calm colour palettes help. Unnecessary animations and autoplaying video can also add sudden bursts of light and/or sound, which will disturb other people in the room.

Closed captioning by default. This works in both noisy and quiet environments. Babies are loud when they want to be, and sometimes you just have to let it wash over you until they’ve had enough. Watching something with captions can help while you wait it out. Also, don’t rely on auto-generated captions without checking them — that can make for a frustrating watch on mute.

Visibility of recurring charges. Subscription reminders are helpful to everyone. I’ve been saved more than once by a reminder that I’m about to be charged for another case of cat food when I already have two unopened boxes. I’ve been able to pause or skip the order before I’m charged and stuck finding a place for that third box.

Make activity easy to find. Add order history and confirmations, flag recent purchases, and options to add delivery dates to a calendar. I often struggle to search for order confirmations, and email searches bring up unrelated results. I’ll admit that when buying my daughter’s school shoes, I’ve had to find what size and brand I bought her the previous year. My fancy new fridge even tries to log what I put in and take out. Though it often confuses my multicoloured hair for produce.

Notify gently. Repeated notifications can be stressful. Let users defer or silence notifications, and respect quiet hours. Avoid sending emails in the middle of the night, too. You might assume no one will read them until morning, but a parent doing a 3 am feed probably will.

No deceptive patterns. Be honest and don’t rely on design techniques that can manipulate user choice. Also be aware that an accessibility barrier can behave like a deceptive pattern. A tiny, low-contrast cancel link steers a tired parent toward confirm just as well as a deliberate trick.

Conclusion

Having a baby is a special time for any parent. But it’s not without its challenges. Modern child-rearing culture puts a lot of pressure on parents, without taking away the other responsibilities they had before. Accessibility matters, and it’s worth remembering that anyone can suddenly need accessibility-friendly designs, even temporarily. Thinking about it in that context, I think it’s fair to say that accessibility is for everyone — not just a select few who fit into a small category of users. Designing for these moments helps more people than just new parents.

Next time you test a workflow, try it one-handed, at 3 am, with frequent interruptions.

Further Reading

https://medium.com/r/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fuxdesign.cc%2Faccessibility-guidelines-for-a-ux-designer-c3ba775539be

References

McNelis, N. (2025) Mom rage: causes, ways to cope, and reasons for hope. Postpartum Support International, 3 May. Available at: https://postpartum.net/mom-rage-causes-ways-to-cope-and-reasons-for-hope/ (Accessed: 29 September 2026).

Microsoft (n.d.) Inclusive 101 guidebook. Microsoft Inclusive Design. Available at: https://inclusive.microsoft.design/articles/inclusive-101-guidebook (Accessed: 29 September 2026).

NHS (2026) Sleep problems. Every Mind Matters. Available at: https://www.nhs.uk/every-mind-matters/mental-health-issues/sleep/ (Accessed: 29 September 2026).

Designing for one hand and no sleep was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.