Setting up a problem that didn’t exist: this experience concept was actually born from a mistake; I made an assumption: I wasn’t aware of any really great platforms for searching for child care providers in a way that made the decision-making process easy. I was a parent to two children, and I had had to choose a daycare — so I thought I had a good idea. My initial problem-statement was based on what I perceived to be a problem: “Parents don’t have any really comprehensive, helpful platforms for choosing a child care facility that suits their needs.”

The audience

I set up my initial discovery by interviewing parents who had gone through the process of searching for a child-care facility within the past 5 years. I wanted to know things like:

• How many times have you had to search for a care provider?
  
• What services did you use to perform your search?
  
• Did you encounter any difficulties?
  
• Describe a typical day in regards to your child’s care?
  
• What pain points do you encounter when interacting with your caregiver?
  

What I learned:

Most parents search for 4-5 child-care providers before making a decision, with location (either to home or on the way to work) being the primary factor. Secondary factors however, all varied among my interviewees:

• Was the curriculum up to “code”?
  
• Was the food high quality?
  
• Can they accommodate my child’s special diet?
  
• I appreciated technology solutions to certain problems
  

Some parents made decisions based simply on the fact that they didn’t like the smell of a facility, or just “gut instinct” based on their observations of how the staff handled interactions with children. Some of my interviewees even decided to forgo a care facility altogether, and hire an in-home caregiver based on the fact that it gave their child a level of personal attention.

In the end, I summed up my findings as such:
‍“Parents are driven by a desire to be involved in their children’s activities, ensure their emotional and physical well-being, and reduce their own stress in their daily routine. Because of this, they required convenience, quality, and personal attention from their child’s care provider.”

Something's missing...

However I began to realize that my problem statement, and in turn my interview structure, was flawed: I wasn’t uncovering the problems I had expected. None of my interviewees reported any real difficulty in being able to find information about local care providers, other than the ones presented due to personal preferences. The search process itself was not a problem. On the other hand, a pattern began to emerge which gave me something to work with: all the “stuff”.Everyone knows parents are busy people. Children need constant attention, care, and come with a lot of baggage, both emotional and physical. In my discovery, the common paint points were:

• Tons of paperwork involved, all of which requires redundant information
• Difficulty keeping abreast of daily classroom events, meals, and curriculum
• Being notified of important things like school closings, health alerts, and reminders to fill out out-of-date paperwork

My revised statement then became:  
‍“Is there a way we can help parents and care facilities have less burdensome interactions?”

How might this work?

Next, I set out to see what was already available in the field of child-care management. I suddenly found myself being confronted with the fact that I was pivoting from an idea that had almost no apparent competition, to another one that was densely populated with products— many of which seemed like quality, feature-rich offerings. Some of these platforms even offered an array of notification preferences for parents, as well as digital document and record management. There was no sense in reinventing a very well-worn wheel. I thought about how I could present a concept that not only offered the same features parents wanted from the competition, but also something better: smart, 2-way digital document organization.

Looking at the user

For this case study, I wanted to keep it simple by developing one single persona; we’ll call her Pam.

• Working mother of three children, one of which is in the care of a child care facility.
• Wants to be involved in her son’s class progress, and likes to be aware of events that are happening in the classroom
• Has physical difficulty filling out paper forms, because she is left-handed
• Regularly-needed paperwork is a repetitive burden and is one less thing she’d like to remember and carry to and from school

“My son’s preschool is wonderful; but it’s hard to feel successful as a parent when there is so much to keep track of.”

Initially, I started to think about the experience that Pam might go through in order to register a child, and used that to kick off my thought process.

This was an initial user flow to show what a parent might have to go through in order to register their child with a daycare.

At first, I sketched out some key pages that might appear on a web-based platform, as this concept would need the potential to be viewed as either a responsive website, or accessed with a native-app sidecar for some technical features.

A few sketches of key screens; 1) Setting child health and diet restrictions, 2) Setting preferences for parental notifications, and 3) A home screen where a parent might view daily classroom updates and photos

Refinement

After I was satisfied with the concept, I refined some of the screens so that my audience could even get a sense of the concept that I was trying to describe.

Initially, in order to validate the overall concept, I asked users complete two task; 1) “Register your child” and 2) “Confirm that you are receiving text notifications to alert you about school closings”

Rethinking the path

The above test was based on someone who simply needed to get their child into the care center; However, after working through some of this and getting ready to do some initial user testing I realized that the above flow did not represent a good enough “happy path” for Pam.

Pam represented a user who already had a child in the care center, and therefore would want a different experience. Particularly since I wanted a differentiating feature of this concept to be the ability to have some smart digital document management, I changed my testing approach and worked out another flow:

Additional refinement

So I took this initial feedback, and put it into some refined UI visuals before I made subsequent tests. I wanted to be able to demonstrate the form capture and editing feature in a more robust manner.