How we found more space in Paris’ nurseries
Applying Design Thinking to public services—a Schoolab case study
For parents, nurseries provides a safe, practical and secure environment with quality caregivers. Places are scarce, especially in Paris. Discover how Schoolab teamed up with nurseries and Paris’ “Caisse d’Allocation Familiale (CAF)” in order to solve this problem for parents and their little ones.
The CAF helps families (regardless of their income) by offering services and benefits such as nurseries and allowances. Whilst these benefits cover most of the cost, they do not guarantee a place for your child. Some Parisian nurseries event recommend future mothers pre-register as soon as they reach the tail-end of their second trimester!
You can imagine how prized these nursery places are. But on the other hand, places are freed up everyday in a large number of nurseries, due to family holidays or child illness. Maybe we could make these places available for other kids?
In a nursery, when a child is absent, the team is there and the child’s spot is available — Valérie Siraud, CAF de Paris
Valerie Siraud, early childhood care project manager at the “CAF de Paris” and her team decided to tackle the problem firsthand whilst also encouraging solidarity between families. To achieve this goal, Schoolab was hired to rethink nurseries’s needs and come up with a solution using a Design Thinking approach: the Lean Factory program.
Design Thinking is often described as a people-oriented way of solving complex problems. It involves three sequential phases:
- Observation, a study of consumer behaviour as well as existing solutions and competition
- Ideation, to bring out concepts responding to consumer problems
- Prototyping, where a solution is tailored specifically to the need(s) in question.
For design thinking to work, you need a set of multidisciplinary profiles working in collaboration: David Malartre as project manager, Elvire Volk as a UX/UI designer, Louis Sommer as web developer and Pierre de Milly as an innovation coach.
#1 — Observation 👀
The first crucial step was for the team to gain an empathic understanding of the people they were designing for i.e the parents, the nurseries and the CAF, in order to solve the problem of unused childcare spots.
From the nursery team to the CAF, parents and toddlers, the team performed close to 30 in-depth interviews over the span of 3 weeks, as well as field observations and benchmarks. This phase really allowed them to gather a substantial amount of crucial information and feed the ideation phase.
If I had known that by simply letting my nursery know of my family holidays meant that my child’s spot could be filled by another one in times of needs, I would have let the nursery know right away! — Omar’s mum, Crèche Espace 19, Paris
The team discovered three crucial things:
- Nurseries are real communities and parents display solidarity
- Positive results were depicted for nurseries who already had a similar system in place: staff would ring a child’s parent on the waiting list every time a spot was freed up
- Changing a child’s nursery too often can have a negative effect on his well-being
#2 — Creativity & prototyping 🎨
After running several creative workshops based on Phase 1’s findings, the team came up with 1 strong concept: a digital solution allowing families to easily report their child’s absence(s). In turn, parents who had not secured a full-time nurseries would be able to access and fill these empty spots temporarily.
In Design Thinking, it is important to get a first non-perfect prototype ready and modify it using customer feedback. In a few days, the team built a first working prototype using Doodle and simple emails. They used the occasion of approaching holidays and asked a group of parents to mark their days off. The prototype was a success and more than 90% of parents filled the form, much more than is usually the case at the nursery!
The team then built a new User Flow of an app based on this experience. Through a series of tests and using feedback from parents, nursery directors and other people, language was adapted, UX (User Experience) was improved, and the simple user flow was turned into a workable prototype.
Unlocks, collective and future, this is how I would define the Lean Factory process in three words — Valérie Siraud, CAF de Paris
Ms Siraud told us that the Lean Factory approach helped overcome obstacles thanks to the collective process of the project. The multidisciplinary collaboration allowed different professions to complement each other and bring about the most adapted solution. It also allowed both the client and the service provider to share a vision and most undoubtedly prepare for the future by focusing on users.
#4 — The Solution 🛠
In less than 2 months, the Schoolab team prototyped an interactive UI (User Interface) model with all the features requested by both nursery directors and parents. It was then implemented in a Web Application with a limited set of features that can be deployed on a number of Parisien nurseries and improved through user feedback.
The key for public services is taking into account the knowledge of the people working on the field. They are the key to the adoption of a new service — Pierre de Milly, Schoolab
#5 — Next steps? 🚀
- A Pilot: a preliminary test of the solution on a limited scale (15 Parisian nurseries centres) at Q3 2019
- An official launch (TBC): extend the solution on a larger scale at the beginning of the 2020 school year.
Want to get involved?
Are you rethinking your public services? Do you want to build them with the people involved?
Reach out at caroline@theschoolab.com
And for those of you who are hungry for more case studies check these out.
