Period:
INDUSTRY:
March - August 2018
Education
LOCATION:
COMPANY:
Sydney, Australia
MY ROLE:
User Experience
User Interaction
Visual Style
Front-end Dev.
Kiddsbay
Kiddsbay is an Australian tech start-up in the youth education space with a mission to equip kids with practical life skills such as business acumen, financial literacy, confidence, networking, problem solving and more so they are ready for the workplace of the future.
Based in Sydney and part of the muru-D accelerator program (supported by Australia’s largest telecommunication provider Telstra) I had the opportunity to meet leading mentors and world class experts in the fields of innovation, business and engineering.
I joined Kiddsbay as their product designer working closely with their two co-founders and a full-stack developer to build the MVP of their business idea. My achievements during that process were:
If you just had 6 months, what would you build?
DELIVER THEIR MVP:
Before finishing the accelerator program (6 months since I joined them).
SOLO DESIGNER:
In a 4 person team working with two co-founders with experience in corporate sales and a full-stack developer.
INTEGRATING LEAN, AGILE AND DESIGN THINKING METHODOLOGIES:
As the founders came from non product development backgrounds.
PIVOT, FAST DECISION MAKING:
The product decisions were changing constantly as we tested our business hypothesis.
EASY COMMUNICATION:
As a small team, we had a shared understanding of the product design process and we focused our efforts on the work to do as well as pivot quickly.
EMPATHY WITH USERS:
The co-founders were a couple with two kids of 8 and 10 years so it was easy to understand the user needs, goals and struggles.
USERS COLLABORATION:
The co-founders has already engaged with several potential users who were willing to collaborate in the co-design sessions and usability tests.
EXPERTS ADVICE:
A group of educators were giving us feedback during the product design process. The critical thinking from the accelerator mentors in term of business, design and engineering was also really important.
Kiddsbay is a kid friendly business building platform that provides every kid the opportunity to be who they want to be.
Inspiring kids to tap into their passions and creativity to identify opportunities and to solve problems. These are invaluable skills that will empower kids globally to become self sufficient.
Each Business Map level is focused in one critical area related with creating a business. Going through each level step by step to create a business allows them to be focus in one specific topic at a time.
Each Business Map Step give kids the clues needed to answer a question related with creating their own business.
Those clues include:
Challenges give kids the opportunity to test their business idea in the real world and to plan and prepare for the launch of their business.
Kids will be able to read inspiring stories as an example of other entrepreneur kids to empathize with them an engage with the platform goal of creating a business.
Kiddsbay is a collaborative tool between parents and kids that allows them to spend valuable time together while learning new skills.
Parents can view their kids progress and help kids advance through the steps of the Kiddsbay Business Map by ticking off challenges to unlock new levels.
I led the team through a LEAN UX methodology by following sprints of research, design, test and evaluate.
When I joined the team, the co-founders had a visual prototype with the idea of teaching kids about financial literacy by creating a digital community for kids where they could earn money by selling their products.
I found they had too many features without customer validation and the product had evolved into a complex concept that would be almost impossible to build by the current dev team, a junior full stack developer.
It was time to start a customer discovery and market research to define a minimum desirable, feasible and viable product that would achieve market fit.
What's the most important thing we need to know first?
“65% of kids entering primary school today will work in completely new jobs that don’t exist yet.”
- McLeod, Scott and Karl Fisch,“Shift Happens”
As a designer, I was the voice of the potential customers through the product development process but first of all, we had to define and validate our customer segment.
Although we saw more business opportunities in the relationship between kids and teachers in schools, finally we decided to focus our MVP in the collaboration between kids and parents as a faster way to get in contact with them to test our product.
If our MVP works as a learning tools between kids and parents, it would be time to scale our product to a full market solution including the relationship between kids and school.
Kids
Parents
We conducted one on one interviews and surveys asking parents about their kids education and future.
Parents believe their kids need to find their passions, work smart, make money, become independent although rarely they link those skills with entrepreneurship.
Parents know there is a problem in traditional education and they are seeking solutions – but which one are the right ones? They are not sure themselves.
Parents do not recognize that learning business skills or entrepreneurship as a possible answer.
We need to think in a solution that teaches kids to be future ready but also helps parents to collaborate with their kids education.
We conducted one on one interviews and surveys asking parents about their kids education and future.
Parents know there is a problem in traditional education and they are seeking solutions – but which one are the right ones? They are not sure themselves.
Parents do not recognize that learning business skills or entrepreneurship as a possible answer.
We need to think in a solution that teaches kids to be future ready but also helps parents to collaborate with their kids education.
Parents believe their kids need to find their passions, work smart, make money, become independent although rarely they link those skills with entrepreneurship.
I created proto-personas, to estimate who would use our product and why; empathy maps to help us to understand our target users feelings and concerns; and also user journey maps to learn about their style of life and interactions.
Does the customer exist?
The co-founders wanted to create a learning tool for kids from 5 to 12 years old. I analyzed both user extremes to understand the similarities and differences between them and decide if we could design something for all of them.
"I want to play and have fun."
Limited skills development, they will need their parents support.
Comprehension through visual examples.
"I have lots of ideas." "I want to have more freedom."
Enough skill development to complete levels independently.
Comprehension through other kids lives examples.
Conduct a continuous topic research drove me to learn about all practical life skills and the best way to embed them. I used divergent thinking processes to consider adult life situations where these skills would be useful and this led to the realization that entrepreneurship and creating a business were a great example of practical life skills applications.
The research was also focused on learning methodologies and educational games and this work identified that best learning tools and games used the ‘Hook Principle’ of trigger, action and reward to engage users.
A competitors analysis and the SWOT matrix provided us a clear overview of the target market and a better understanding of our unfair advantages and weaknesses.
Practical life skills
Business Model Canvas
The Hook Canvas
How might we teach kids about practical life skills?
We found that being future ready, being financial independent and get a job all depended on your skills learned.
We also tried applying those questions to the adult life and we find out that a way to ensure a job is to become entrepreneur and create your own business.
If we teach kids how to become entrepreneurs and create their own business, they will be ready for the critical thinking needed in their future.
It was need to join the whole team for the ideation phase. Before starting I explained the conclusion of the user research, the personas discovered, and the problem to solve so everyone was at the same point to start the brainstorming.
How might we teach kids how to create their own business?
The best idea from the brainstorming session was to create a business builder based on the business model canvas where kids had:
- Enough info/explanations to complete it.
- A simple and effective visualization of their business model.
- The possibility of testing hypothesis in the real world and change their business model.
After the feedback session we started prototyping the best rated proposals. All team members participate in this session by using sketches and low-fidelity wireframes. That allowed us to test early with our target users and validate which one was the most logical before defining too much of the product.
To design doubts related to the user flow I defined the different cases where users would interact with the platform by making hypothesis about how they would act and what they would need.
These hypothesis helped me to communicate to the team the prototyping decisions although it was needed the user testing for validation.
As a way to quickly test our idea we facilitated a number of workshops where kids were interacting between them and their parents.
These workshops were a critical tool that helped us to define the platform content: which topics and activities the kids were interested in, which ones the parents thought were valuable for their future and how to intercalate the theory learning with practical activities.
The sooner you give your customers a voice, the sooner you'll learn whether you've got an idea that works.
Once the user flow and the platform architecture was defined and validated it was time to focus on the user interaction and the visual style.
I worked in sprints for each feature/workflow with the aim to have the most defined approach possible before starting the implementation. On each sprint I created high-fidelity wireframes and functional prototypes that the users tested.
We created example stories to engage kids with the product by telling them inspiring entrepreneur kid stories.
We created groups of beta testers (kids from a couple of schools) and we tested our progress with them once a week. We also met with some families to test how parents and kids where interacting with the app together.
We planned weekly sprints for the design and development of each user flow and feature the platform. The feedback obtained after the usability tests was really valuable to validate our sprints steps.
I used different prototyping techniques depending on the audience:
On this project, I was the sole responsible of the front-end development (HTML & CSS) for the platform.
I worked close to the back-end developer to make the prototype a real product. I coordinated our efforts by implementing and managing the use of the Kanban method for tasks management.
A test servidor allowed us to check the things we were building worked properly before pushing new changes allowing us to find bugs.
The last milestones in the MVP development was to run a test of the online platform in the technological seminary for kids, Code Club Australia, where around one hundred kids had the chance to try our platform and provided us valuable feedback to keep working on the platform.
