Afterschool
How being able to explore and organize children’s extracurricular activities in one place helps parents optimize after-school time and reduce stress
ROLE: Sole Product Designer (with mentorship from Senior UX Designers)
TIMELINE: 4 month-long (Aug- Nov 2022) concept project for my Springboard UI/UX certification
TOOLS: Figma, Figjam, Miro, POP Marvel
PROJECT CONTEXT
In today’s fast-paced world, parents often find themselves juggling multiple responsibilities. Almost all parents I know with children 18 years or younger and I being a parent myself, all have one thing in common-stories of how stressful our after-school hours are! Their stories inspired me to choose this topic to help parents manage their after-school time and reduce the stress and chaos that comes with it.
PROBLEM
❗️
Parents are stressed and overwhelmed in after-school hours with not enough free time
My research revealed that enrollment in multiple structured activities driven by today's competitive world contributes to stress during after-school hours, resulting in exhausted parents running around to keep up with their children's schedules and feeling overwhelmed.
SOLUTION
💡
Helping parents take control of their after-school time with a one-stop app for easy planning and prioritization of children's activities
The one-stop app for after-school activities optimizes time, offering parents flexibility, convenience, and control through centralized access, customizable scheduling, and goal prioritization, reducing stress and overwhelm.
SECONDARY RESEARCH
🔍
Narrowing the focus to understand parents' after-school approach, motivations, barriers, and frustrations
I began this project by conducting desk research to understand how parents manage after-school time and the challenges they face, which provided context and direction for my user interviews. Interesting insights were uncovered through the desk research, such as:
Source: Lending Tree, Global News/ Ipsos
Source: Lending Tree, CNN
Source: Pewresearch
COMPETITOR ANALYSIS
📊
The competition lacked usability, flexibility and awareness
Existing extracurricular activity apps like Activity Hero, Kidpass, and Rooster lack brand awareness and have limited activity options. None of the apps address scheduling conflicts or offer efficient management of daily activity routines, indicating an opportunity for a new app.
Based on my heuristic analysis of the competitor apps, it was evident that they lacked in terms of user control, recognition, and consistency.
PRIMARY RESEARCH
👥
Why parents continue to over-schedule activities despite being overwhelmed?
To better understand the problem space, five user interviews were conducted with full-time working moms with two or more children aged between 3-12 years and enrolled in two or more extracurricular activities a week. A screener survey was used to recruit participants for the user interviews and determine the average number of activities children participate in weekly.
“19 out of 30 parents report kids attending two or more activities per week according to the screener survey.”
The main objective of the user interviews was:
Why do parents over-schedule activities despite the stress?
Identify additional stress factors.
Explore current scheduling approaches used by parents.
User interviews provided valuable insights into parents' behaviors, pain points, and needs.
SYNTHESIS
📌
Affinity mapping revealed key patterns surrounding guilt, pressure, engagement and time
Using Miro, I created an affinity diagram to organize and uncover patterns in my research, revealing various problems contributing to parents' stress and overwhelm after school.
PROBLEM DEFINITION
👩👧👦
a single mom to two kids seeking a solution to optimize her time while also keeping her kids engaged and helping them get future-ready
Meet Overwhelmed Olivia,
Overwhelmed Olivia
Single mom to two kids, Marketing Manager
“It is so important to raise well-rounded kids today, but they keep me so busy! I wish I had more time. It’s frustrating!”
Frustations:
Does not have time for herself
Getting details and shortlisting an activity is time-consuming
Always rushing around transporting kids to different activities
Goals:
Optimize her time
Feel happy and relaxed
Decrease the feeling of guilt
Not feel rushed
Needs:
Children to be productive in their after-school time
Avoid screen-time
Raise well-rounded kids
Creating the persona Olivia based on research insights proved invaluable in guiding me through design decisions, ensuring the product addressed real-world user needs and data-driven problem-solving rather than relying solely on intuition.
How might we help Olivia optimize her after-school time so that she can achieve a healthy balance between kids, work and self-care?
IDEATION
💭
Empowering Olivia with control, convenience and flexibility to optimize time and achieve balance
With research and synthesis in mind, the next step was determining the best way to help Olivia.
With the help of Crazy-8's technique and dozens of sketches later, I could identify the most impactful direction. While there could many ways to help Olivia, according to research, extracurricular activities for children played a vital role. At the same time, over-committing to it was a significant factor contributing to Olivia's stress.
Hence, it was essential to equip Olivia with easy solution access to extracurricular activities, combining it with a calendar to help her visualize and make informed decisions that align with her goals and schedule and provide necessary tools to reduce chaos to help her achieve a healthy balance.
Crazy-8’s exercise to come up with multiple design solutions quickly
MAPPING THE EXPERIENCE
📲
Olivia needs a solution that enables her to find, prioritize, organize and manage children’s activities easily
I generated many potential user stories to help create a high-level structure of the solution. Then, I worked to prioritize which features would be absolutely crucial to creating a meaningful solution for Olivia. Olivia’s goals and needs were instrumental in defining the MVP.
Eliminating the above features was necessary due to their complexity, making them unfit for the MVP's scope. However, booking activities through the app has great potential to generate revenue in the future via a sponsorship monetization model.
USER FLOWS
🔀
The steps users like Olivia would take to achieve their goals
User Flows helped me map out and visualize the user stories to design a clear and intuitive user experience
SKTECHING
✏️
Designing for Olivia: Sketching to visualize layouts quickly and identify essential design elements
From identifying UX patterns to conducting informational interviews with experts and studying different apps, I explored various possibilities to cater to Olivia's needs. By this point, it was time to bring ideas to life, refining each screen and evaluating its effectiveness. Next, it was time to put my design to the test.
Sketching to identify crucial elements and screen layouts without getting caught up in details like pixels, fonts etc.
GUERRILLA USABILITY TESTING
🕵️♀️
Takeaway: Users need the ability to add multiple child profiles and easy access to favorited activities
Using the sketches of the app, I created an interactive prototype using Marvel POP, and conducted guerrilla usability tests with five participants. Early testing helped me validate design decisions and identify areas that needed to be revised. Next, I began the design process by creating wireframes based on the testing feedback.
VISUAL DESIGN
🎨
From branding to style guide - the result was “Afterschool”
Before diving into high-fidelity mock-up design, I first defined the brand platform and style guide as design guidelines. The brand name "Afterschool" was chosen to focus on extracurricular activities after school. A caring and enthusiastic personality with helpful, inclusive, and effortless attributes will inspire users to rely on the brand for managing after-school time.
A style guide to help maintain consistency and coherence in the design by providing guidelines
HIGH-FIDELITY USABILITY TESTING
🔬
Takeaway: Confusion over session frequency, participant selection for activity and event invites
The app's high-fidelity screens were designed with accessibility and the style guide in mind, and a prototype was created to simulate the live version, allowing for engaging and insightful two rounds of usability testing.
THE SOLUTION
🎉
Reducing Frustration
Streamlining and personalizing activity discovery to save time and effort
A centralized platform and personalized recommendations
Easily explore and discover activities all in one place
Save time and effort by eliminating the need to visit multiple websites or apps
Personalized recommendations to save time spent on finding activities that align with children’s interests
Reducing Stress and Rushed Feeling
Finding activities as per needs & schedule to feel relaxed & manage time efficiently
Customized scheduling
Organization, prioritization and collaboration
Easily view what afterschool day, week, or month looks like
Get a visual overview of the schedule to help prioritize and set realistic goals and avoid overcommitting
Invite people to the calendar to share the pickup drop off responsibility easily
Easily filter activities based on one’s needs and preferences
Avoid scheduling conflicts by connecting the calendar and filtering activities based on the schedule
Increasing Confidence
Making informed decisions and saving time with all necessary information in one place
Reducing Overwhelm and Frustration
Helping parents plan ahead of time to feel relaxed and in control of their schedules
Smart reminders for hassle-free activity management
Smart reminder like “when to leave to” avoid the last-minute rush
Set unlimited reminders to plan ahead
Add notes like things to carry to the activities to avoid last-minute chaos
Reducing Stress and Overwhelm
Organized schedule view with collaboration to reduce stress and overcommitment
Comprehensive details
Easily access and compare activity details in one place
Message activity providers and receive replies in the app’s inbox
Select a child and add activities to a specific child’s schedule on the calendar
Reviews to help make informed decisions and favorite interested activities to find them at a later date easily
SOLUTION
🎉
IMPACT
🌟
High-fidelity testing reveals that parents find the app interesting and very helpful
This project helped me grow more confident in user research and usability testing while also highlighting the opportunities for continued growth and improvement.
To truly measure the success of this app, I would track the % of users who add activities to favorites and or to the calendar (task completion rate), those who continue using the app over time (app retention rate), average session duration, and monitor the rate at which users adopt and integrate the app into their daily routines (adoption rate). These metrics would help me determine if the app meets its goals and provides value to users.
6/10
Participants said that they would add activities to the calendar
9/10
Participants eagerly embraced the app, expressing a desire to use it
"I love the event invitations and smart reminders on the calendar!"
-usability test participant
“I wish this app was for real, it would have been so helpful.”
-usability test participant
REFLECTIONS
🪞
Embracing ambiguity and balancing conflicting user needs
This project taught me the significance of balancing conflicting user needs. As per research, while parents need to avoid over-committing to prevent stress, they also want to ensure their children get exposed to different activities. While a deep understanding of user research was necessary, willingness to embrace ambiguity in the design process was crucial. I also learned that the design process isn’t linear and that bouncing back and forth between design phases is okay.
Test early and test often
By testing early and throughout the design process, I was able to catch issues early and make necessary changes before it was too late. It also allowed me to gather valuable feedback from users and iterate on the design to meet their needs more effectively. I also learned how important recruiting the right participants are to get good and true insights.
NEXT STEPS
🔜
Further validate the calendar feature
One important next step would be to validate the calendar feature further, understand its usefulness to the users, and identify areas for improvement.
Improve the onboarding process
I would also like to improve the onboarding experience and make it short and clear to ensure that users can easily navigate the app and understand its features. A streamlined and intuitive onboarding process can lead to increased user engagement and retention.
Explore the viability of potential future features
Aside from the core features above, I’d like to explore the viability of potential future features like booking activities, scheduling carpooling, and activity time tracker. This will help to identify opportunities for further development and improvement.
PROTOTYPE