A parent-centric childcare marketplace

Finding childcare is often a stressful experience for parents - coping with the sense of guilt, separation anxiety and the pressure of finding that perfect caring, stimulating environment for their little ones.

To alleviate the stress around making the right choice, we were working to create a single experience for parents of children under 6 where they can search for all local centres, review the program, educators, facilities and services, get a general feel for the centre and its reputation, check real time availability and send an enquiry, all in one place.

How could we help parents easily connect with childcare centres, giving them the information they need to make the right choice for their child? Toddle, based in Australia, was designed to put power back in the hands of the parents and give them confidence in their choice of day care.

When I joined, I was solely responsible for the end-to-end UX of the Toddle platform including 70% of its UI.

The idea of Toddle was in its early days of development, however, the market research into the childcare industry and initial discovery efforts showed early signs of its great purpose and potential.

I was amazed to learn that the day care industry in Australia is worth $10.7bn.

During my time with Toddle I also had a chance to learn more about marketing and marketing strategies, sales strategies and art direction since I collaborated a lot with all teams involved in helping Toddle take off and ‘stick’ as a start-up.

Research, analysis and early designs

Understanding the landscape, people’s needs and the context is always crucial for moving the product in the right direction - I was taking into account consumers (parents) as well as customers (centres), assessing their operational challenges.

To fully immerse myself in the experience of choosing childcare in Australia, I dug up the most up-to-date government research into childcare and subsidies, looked over a number of published parent surveys and spoke to my Australian colleagues and friends who have children. I also interviewed Arthur, the founder and the CEO of Toddle, who had plenty of insights into the world of day care in Australia since he had a successful childcare business running 20+ day care centres.

I’ve also looked at competition and their business models, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses, comparing functionality they had and the overall value proposition. Most common problem across the industry was the lack of accurate data and a more human approach to presenting important information that parents needed.

There were certainly big gaps around providing reassurance to parents that their kids are in good hands and in the right environment: questions like “who’ll be looking after my child? What is my child going to be fed? How safe is the setting? How are they going to help my child develop physically, mentally and socially?” were popping up a lot in user interviews. One way of solving it would be providing the answers through engaging and interactive, immersive content - from photos and videos (shot from a child’s height) to staff profiles.

At the end of the research process me and my team started fondly referring to Toddle as an ‘airBnb for childcare’ because of the obvious similarities in our attempt to offer an immersive experience for parents and children during the process of researching and choosing a place children will be spending their early years.

Design system: Set-up for better process and cost savings

While getting a better understanding of who we’re designing for and why, I started mapping out and sketching up the main flows, and after a few days we’ve had our MVP.

I also started looking into setting up a design system on the back of the brand guidelines to streamline the design and development process. Working closely with our UI designer, I ran through the elements and components we might need and looking at the initial templates we needed for launch.

We ended up using that design system for any future design, running regular reviews and updates to it to keep it relevant.

In search for future ideas to secure market leadership

Our product would have similar features to a few other players on the market - those were considered a market standard and would sit comfortably with the users’ mental models. However, as they say, a product is not an island, and for Toddle to stay not only relevant but ahead of the game, I took a service design approach, looking at improvements we can make to the experiences both - on and outside of our platform.

I proposed running a team workshop, inviting the CEO to join us. Ahead of the workshop I created large drafts of the Customer journey map for both - customers and consumers - that we could collaborate on, a service blueprint and some visual illustrations of some interesting product ideas that crossed my mind during earlier research stages. At the same time our art director prepared some creative explorations of the marketing ideas that would complete the ‘story’ and the narrative we were going to co-create.

Prototype

Taking a couple of ‘quick win’ ideas from the workshop (e.g. improving the accuracy and the patterns of the fees & availability module, allowing parents to create a shortlist of centres they could quickly compare and to enquire with multiple centres at once, better serving the information needs), I created a number of prototypes to put in front of the user.

Testing

I wasn’t familiar with the user recruitment tools/apps that were specifically aimed at the Australian market but, after doing a brief investigation, I landed on Askable - and I couldn’t be happier with my choice. I got fantastic support from their team. With some clarification I set up a screener and scheduled 10 sessions with users that matched our criteria. I solely ran, recorded and processed the interviews and the prototype feedback.

The main win was the enquiry form - 9/10 users commented without a prompt that it felt very quick and effortless to submit an enquiry - considering there were around 10 questions they needed to answer. I used the principle of progressive disclosure, focussing user’s attention on one task at a time, ‘chunking’ information.

I prioritised and split my other findings into 3 ‘buckets’ - quick wins, medium priority and strategic changes that required further investigation.

Since we had a fixed launch date, we threw our time and energy into implementing the quick wins (mostly to do with changing UI patterns to make the experience more intuitive) and a couple of medium changes of making some features more discoverable/visible and some journeys a bit more obvious to the user (e.g. enquiring with multiple centres at once).

Post launch and covid

After a soft launch, we picked up a few items from the ‘strategic bucket’ to work on whilst watching the user enquiries grow steadily in GA and hotjar, where we could see the key journeys performing well with the bounce rate staying low.

One of the things we were going to look into is a real time visit booking system that could be integrated with the centres’ own CRMs, and the other one was exploring a better way of comparing and sharing saved centres.

However, our discovery and testing plans were derailed and the development put on hold with the arrival of the infamous virus.

Very quickly the company partnered with one of the biggest supermarkets in Australia, and we adapted our enquiry forms and the messaging on the front page to support essential workers through our childcare marketplace platform.

Overall, our ethical approach, transparent UX and decisions backed by our collective expertise, connections, insights and data, helped the company not only to stay afloat, but also to raise brand awareness, increase the number of daily enquiries and lay the infrastructure for Toddle to become the strongest player on the market.