Go to the profile of Marek Mencl
Marek Mencl

Design focused on parents and children

Mozaika private kindergarten and school in Mnichovice near Prague. A place where children like to go, where they can express their own opinions, and where they are respected by their teachers. A place whose website we redesigned alongside Pábení and created a web environment that benefits both the parents and the kindergarten.

Step 1. Getting to know each other

At an internal workshop with the kindergarten management and two curious schoolkids, we tried to understand and identify the visions and business of the school and kindergarten. We gathered arguments and distilled first opportunities and competitive advantages. One of them was the fact that the teaching here complies with the principles set by Marie Montessori. This method is sought by parents dissatisfied with the classic approach to the education of children in state-run organizations.

Step 2. Meeting the parents

After the first step we had an idea. And that’s all we had to work with. We had some idea of the design opportunities we could use, but before we started to create the prototypes we needed to get familiar with our audience — the parents. We organized a focus group, where we spent three hours talking with parents about how they decided on a certain school and kindergarten. From this, we were abke to define their actual needs, worries, and desires. This was an extremely important step for us. Without it, we’d have ended up with mere assumptions. Both from us and from our clients.

Workshop with the parents

Step 3. Evaluating what we learned

The meeting was extremely beneficial. We gathered dozens of stories and, mainly, formed a realistic idea of the world of parents who have to make such difficult decisions. Our original idea — to build the website on a presentation of principles of teaching according to Montessori — was abandoned. The parents we talked to were looking for something else: They wanted a decent environment their children would look forward to going to and where they would be taken care of. That was the most important, regardless of the teaching method.

From the data gathered, we created a content structure for the website and then a structure for individual pages. We followed the rules of the SEE-THINK-DO-CARE framework. “Mozaika for you” was an essential webpage (not the homepage) for us, as it addressed the most important worries and desires of the parents.

Internal workshop — data processing

Step 4. Creating the content

In his book Design is a Job, Mike Monteiro aptly says that the only person who visits a website because of its design, not because of its content, is its webdesigner, a webdesigner working for a competitor, and the client. In our case, it was the end client that we were mainly concerned with: The parent. That’s who we created the website and wrote the text for. It should be helpful, offer parents some hints, and attract them to take a tour of Mozaika itself.

We spent 35 hours working on the text and subsequent revisions. We used shared documents on Google Drive, which helped us easily involve more members of the team.

Step 5. Designing

We played around with our first proposals; we looked for an optimal solution for the header and the footer, and we worked with the text. We wanted to create the simplest text possible, while still supporting the content and leading the users well. We knew what the parents needed — to quickly find information, without having to go through pages of pastel images.

In total, we spent over 30 hours on the design. We iterated and consulted proposals through Invision, which is an ideal tool for remote feedback and proposal presentation.

Original proposal
New proposal — “Using love and respect to ensure our children’s development”

Step 6. Forgot about the homepage

We were so fucosed on the important and essential (in terms of content) that we forgot all about the homepage! The page almost every cooperation with webdesign studios begins with, since it is, as they say, “the most important page.” That isn’t exactly true, though. The Mozaika website would still work perfectly without it, because our concept for it was a place that directed you further on in case you accidentally opened it. Essentially, its goal was to get the use off of it as quickly as possible.

Step 7. Developing

In the future, we’d like to provide Mozaika with the option to administer some of its content on its own. So we decided to implement a Wordpress content management system, onto which we built the graphical proposal.

Demonstration of development

We spent almost 50 hours coding the template and implementing the system. We processed the whole project in Basecamp which — thanks to its shared to-do lists — helped us quickly incorporate all the requests and find errors.

Step 8. Launching

We implemented the content, fixed the last of the errors, and deployed Google Analytics in which we set conversion goals that will serve as one of the references for further development of the website.

We launched the new Mozaika. With a solid strategy, good content, a helpful design, and intuitive display. And we’re hoping it’s at least half as good as the school we had an opportunity to get to know personally — an institution which educates children with their own sense and responsibility.

Task for you

Can you tell what the main goal of the new Mozaika website is? Tell us in the comments.

Project by Pábení.cz & Friends