PAL by Project Playdate

PAL by Project Playdate

I was lucky enough to work with PAL by Project Playdate, a soon-to-launch website that connects parents with shared childcare needs to a highly selective network of childcare providers. It is improving access to high quality and affordable child care by allowing parents to pool and split the cost of care and creating access to meaningful, well-paid job opportunities for teaching professionals. Here's part of the brief we received:

PROJECT OVERVIEW
Set to launch in September 2018, the PAL platform will be a responsive website with the intention to become a mobile app within the next year. Building a mobile app is an immediate company goal that can significantly enhance user experience and will be critical to the company’s early success.
We are seeking assistance in the design of this mobile application.

The app had a diverse array of needs including comprehensive user profiles, messaging, in-app calendars and calendar integration, filtering, browsing by both playdates and caregivers, the ability to 'follow' caregivers, and schedule recurring playdates. There are also not one, but two main categories of user–parents and specialists.

Generating trust between parents and caregivers requires supplying a great deal of information including background checks, past experience, and the caregivers background in education and their outside interests. We conducted user research, multiple rounds of usability testing (coming up with a script and tasks), and three rounds of prototyping as well as a heuristics evaluation and a few other deliverables.

Research & Synthesis

We conducted two rounds of user interviews. We were initially planning to design the caregiver-facing portions of the application, and interviewed that group first. After conducting those interviews, however, we realized a lot more research was needed to adequately design the caregiver-facing portion of the application, and we decided it would be more productive in terms of business and time to focus on the pre-existing customer base of parents. Our caregiver interviews were still valuable, however, because we were able to align their interests with those of the parents, and then highlight those aspects in our final product.

After the two rounds of interviews, the first with the caregivers and the second with the parents, we found the groups had shared needs. By addressing these shared needs in our design, we could maximize the effectiveness of the communication between parents and caregivers, as well as the speed at which parents would be able to book playdates/caregivers could get bookings.

Problem Statement

Based on these findings, we formulated a problem statement and created a persona based on our research in order to help define the direction of our design process.

In addition to dealing with a heavy workload, Jen wants to spend “adult time” with her partner and friends, but has trouble scheduling child care with someone who she trusts to enrich her child’s development. How can we allow her to schedule this type of care so she can immerse herself in other, necessary activities without worry?

The most crucial element to a parent’s happiness with childcare services had to do with trust in two parts:

1. That the child was safe.

2. That the child was having an enriching and engaging experience.

Persona

Feature Prioritization

Usability Testing

Based on the needs of the application, we designed tasks that would test the ability of the app to facilitate a parent picking an activity for their child, providing sufficient information within the caregiver’s profile to generate trust, book the event, to add it to their calendar, and to begin a correspondence with the caregiver.

During our usability testing, we had few to no problems with the application. All users successfully completed all tasks assigned to them, and all parents stated they felt trusted the caregiver enough with the information given to them. We still made a few alterations for the sake of best practice.

User Flow

Testimonial & Final thoughts

Once again, on this project, I had an amazing team. Our ability to communicate and collective attention to detail meant we were able to work incredibly efficiently once we were able to conduct our initial round of user research.

We presented to Project Playdate/PAL's CEO and management team. Amanda was happy enough that she sent us a brief endorsement immediately afterward, and told us she plans to pitch the app and the rest of our deliverables to a group of stakeholders.

Danielle, Melissa and Natasha are a remarkably talented team that exceeded our expectations in delivering the user experience mock ups for our mobile application. First, as professionals, they are each extremely diligent, hard working and easy to communicate with. They each know how to work well on a team, clearly carrying their own weight while focusing first on the success of their collective efforts. They always made it a priority to be transparent with us on their insights, progress and challenges. They never failed to be prepared, on time and present during our meetings. In addition, we were blown away by how exceptionally intuitive this team was to the goals of our business and needs of our users. This combined professionalism with an indisputable mastery of user experience design resulted in a phenomenal outcome for our business. We are so very grateful for their work and couldn't recommend them more highly.