Case Study: WhenThen Kids

Published in

HannahCharis

8 min readSep 27, 2016

This is it! Our last project in the intensive UX Design program at RED Academy with a real client to showcase everything we’ve learned over the last eight weeks. With a team of three, we were able to deliver a product that our client truly loved, and was very grateful for.

Discovery

Millions of people around the world seek and receive parenting support. Parents are online and hungry for parenting information.

WhenThen Kids is an online course for raising confident kids. The program is evidence-based, and includes over 1,000 curated facts and activities. These pieces along with interviews and recommended products form the content of the program.

It’s been scientifically proven that parenting impacts children on a biochemical and psychological level.

The program has numerous topics; each one bundled as a separate mini-course. Each topic repeats the same pattern: an article, a reflection activity, a 3-part section on teaching the topic to your child, and a list of participant questions and resources.

Almost a third of children starting school are not ready for the classroom, with many lacking social skills, having speech problems or not toilet trained, new research warns.

WhenThen Kids is…

convenient education for busy parents who cannot make time to sign in to a course platform.
pushed information that is bite-sized and cumulative.
not a course in theory, but in practical daily parenting strategies.

The Opportunity

They launched their website in May, and their beta program in June of this year. Currently, the program is being sent out via email subscription using AWeber. After six weeks of testing, users find the content easy to understand, interesting, tangible, and useful. However, they also found that:

There is a lot of content and some are falling behind.
The email layout is cumbersome; they can be too long.

Business Constrictions

After meeting with the client, and knowing that the business is a startup and still on beta, we had certain limitations being:

The client doesn’t have the resources to develop her product into an app.
Although the client has about 800 facts and 400 activities in their backlog, they can only create publications biweekly, not all at once.
The client also researches and curates constantly, so the contents of the program are made progressively.
The client needs to be able to disseminate the program, as they currently do with the email subscription.

Organizational Research

To have a feel of what it’s like to be a WhenThen Kids’ user, we jumped into their onboarding process:

1 — We visited their website, and were quickly impressed at the overall visual appeal of it.

2 — We checked every page the site contains to find that there was no established flow for the user to experience; IA needed work, and there was only a couple CTA (call-to-action) buttons on the entire site.

3 — We then signed up, so we can start receiving her content.

4 — As per what we’ve discovered earlier, the email layout truly had some potential to be more engaging and the information more digestible.

Domain Research

To further expand our knowledge on this field, we investigated on three main sources:

Social & Emotional Learning Resources — they were scientific, research-based, informative to educators, but not practical to parents
Online Parenting Courses — easy access, but very time-consuming for busy parents
Parenting apps — their approach is more remedial, not preventative

Business Goals

After all these that we’ve learned about the organization and the domain, we came up with three business goals:

1 — Generate new leads → by having program highlights on the homepage to increase the acquisition rate of subscribers; have more CTA buttons for signing up

2 — Build trust over quality of content → by having a list of evidence-based sources to back up her content

3—Retain current and potential subscribers → by creating convenient, seamless, and engaging content

User Research

For this vital part of the research, we’ve conducted both surveys and interviews among WhenThen Kids’ current subscribers, as well as potential ones.

Key Findings

Here are the information we’ve gathered out of the 44 respondents:

Users are happy about their WhenThen Kids’ experience.

Users prefer the current delivery method which is via email.

And when they were asked which aspects are most important to them when seeking out parenting information, their answers were:

Credibility (78.3%)
Evidence-based Research (73.9%)
Testimonials (69.6%)

Persona

After gathering insights about the users, we then created the persona of Allie Francis.

She’s a parent of two; active, busy, on-the-go, and driving her kids everywhere. She is a mid-high income earner who is in a financial and emotional position to think about her children’s future. Also, Allie is a career-oriented woman who is always looking for ways to better her children, but frustrated of not having the time or resources to do so.

Scenario

To have a better understanding of Allie’s journey, imagine this scenario:

Allie Francis’ second daughter just started preschool.
Since the new curriculum incorporates social and emotional development, Allie wants to learn more about it, so she can contribute to her child’s learning. However, she doesn’t know where to start.
As a busy professional and a mother of two, Allie doesn’t have the free time to read books or take parenting courses. She tried to search up parenting tips online, but she found it overwhelming, and difficult to trust the source of the content.

During one of her Facebook chats with Kim, another parent in school, Allie brought up her concerns about wanting to learn more about social and emotional learning. So Kim recommended a program she is currently taking called WhenThen Kids, and shared their website via their Facebook chat.

Planning

With that scenario in mind and the time constraint of three weeks to work on this project, we focused on two main goals of the on-boarding process to target both the business and user needs:

Activation

We want Allie to have a seamless and informative experience before committing to the WhenThen Kids program, so we restructured the information architecture (site map) of her website, and strategized on how and when content was laid out through a user flow.

Through a user flow, we mapped out the journey of our persona, as well as other potential users, as soon as they land on the website. We strategically created a navigational flow that links the pages, so no matter what route they take, they will eventually be encouraged to sign up for the program.

Retention

We redesigned the way their content was also presented with an engaging layout to retain Allie as a subscriber. We used Adobe Spark for this redesign, and showed our client how they can easily make use of this tool to make their content more fun and digestible.

Then…

And now! → https://spark.adobe.com/page/pnWVdDBFFh62a/

Design

Keeping in mind these goals and Allie’s considerations such as credibility, accessibility and efficiency, we started wireframing and prototyping collaboratively — from whiteboard sketches, paper prototypes, to digital wireframes.

Colour

Since we’re really impressed and found that her current colour palette matches her branding, we stayed with it.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Iconography

So Allie can digest the information better and clearly understand what WhenThen Kids is all about, we made use of iconography to portray information in a more visual way.

To show that the WhenThen Kids’ four themes are part of a holistic approach, we visualized it into a puzzle made up of four pieces representing them.

We also created a better navigation menu that is concise and relevant only at the current part of Allie’s journey; we made use of progressive disclosure when showing menu items.

And on their footer, we have their site map laid out for easy reference.

Lastly, we revamped their Thank You page from a simple message to a more visual and amusing way to bring some lightness to the worried parent.

Build + Test

Through testing, we found to make changes in:

font sizes → they were smaller than expected on an actual mobile device
button sizes → we made them at least 44px X 44px
drop-down menu → push content downward instead of an overlay

With every step of the way, we have tested our design choices to make sure we are focusing on what Allie’s needs are, which eventually led us to our final mockup.