Kidopass — UX Case Study

Capstone 2-week solo project at Ironhack Paris Bootcamp

6 min readNov 22, 2018

Brief

The founder of the French startup Kidopass , whom I worked with for my final project at Ironhack UX/UI bootcamp, wants to make parents’ life easier by helping them find interesting activities for their kids and as a result having a quality family time.

The client’s idea was to develop a mobile application with a geolocalisation feature to allow parents to book activities, wherever they are, and go there with kids right away.

Challenge

I was thrilled to work with a real client and help Kidopass with its development.

I had one week to research and one week to propose principal functionalities (MVP) as well as to prototype and test one user flow.

Process

To do this I applied the Design Thinking method.

Empathizing

I conducted 8 interviews and got around 50 responses to the online survey. The aime was to understand parents’ current experience, how they decide and choose what to do with their kids, how they plan and what they are frustrated about. I used Lean Survey Canvas to prepare my online survey. This canvas also facilitates writing interview scenarios.

What do parents say about organising time with their kids?

“It’s always a race” Frederique, 39 yo, lawyer, 2 kids
“I hate seeing my kids being bored and complaining after all the efforts I made for organising this” — Jean-Michel, 41 yo, project manager, 2 kids
“I want my kids to learn something new” — Roudolf, 55 yo, 3 kids
“I want my boy to socialize and find new friends” — Yohann, 40 yo, 1 kid
“I don’t want drive more than 20 minutes to get to a restaurant on a night out with our kids” — Jerome, 48 yo, 3 kids

What are common denominators for all these parents?

To figure this out I summarized my findings in an affinity diagram. This time I was using the Real Time Board tool to share my work with the client.

As ordinary as it may sound, all the parents plan according the weather conditions.

When it’s sunny, everybody wants to enjoy good weather outside.

If it’s raining, would it be cinema, swimming pool or going to a restaurant, all parents want something close to their home.

Moreover, nobody likes having long journeys which are tiresome for both kids and parents.

And, of course, it’s important to do something exciting, have a valuable experience, make good memories. No parent would like to see their kid bored or disappointed.

To see what was available on the market, I did a competitor analysis and none of the sites was helping to choose activities depending on the weather. You could be looking for something in February and got suggested a row boat trip at +5 degrees. Brrrrr.

According to the survey over 60% of parents book some activities 2 to 3 times per month.

As for the planning, about 60% of parents plan in advance, especially those with more than one kid, and 40% improvise the same day. Analysing these results I thought that developing a responsive web site would make more sense than having a mobile application.

Defining

For this stage I organized a co-creative workshop with the client to present my research findings as well as to work on next steps. During this workshop we defined our primary persona, Yohann, his journey and his pain points.

Co-creative workshop artefact — user journey

I was pretty happy with the deliverables of my first client’s workshop. The founder appreciated the quality of the results presented.

During this workshop we also agreed that developing a mobile application was not coherent with the user research findings.

The client accepted that it was better to have a responsive web site.

Problem statement: How can we help parents to have quality time with their kids without a hassle in any weather?

Ideating

For my individual brainstorming session I have united all the design opportunities by using “How Might We” question keeping in mind the problematics of our users.

By the time I got to this stage, the idea of proposing activities based on the weather forecast was already pretty clear. I just didn’t know yet how to visualise it. To get some inspiration I was looking through weather forecasting sites, Dribble, Behance, Muzly etc.

Prototyping & Testing

I have defined a user flow detailing all the actions a user has to take on the site starting from opening our site till receiving a booking confirmation. That allowed me to have a clear understanding of screens to prototype.

Keeping in mind the “mobile first” approach I prototyped the screens for a mobile device.

I borrowed Google weather forecast visual to test my idea.

You can see below my mid-fidelity wireframes

After rounds of testing the prototype endured several changes, notably on the home page. Users feedback made me combine “choose the date” function with the weather forecast.

Parents really liked the concept of the activities proposed based on weather conditions. They were also happy with search results presented on the map. They were saying the site would save them a lot of time.

On a separate note, during the tests of low fidelity prototypes parents were commenting that they would love to see bright engaging colours, corresponding to dynamic and variable activities they could find on the site.

Even though I’m not showing my UI deliverables as my priority is UX process, it’s worth to mention that my colour palette takes its origin in basketball. From the interviews I knew that most of the kids were playing basketball on a regular basis. The energy of this bouncy ball made me choose orange as one of the colours.

Overall user feedback was very positive — the site met parents’ needs.