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18 Northumberland Avenue, London, UK
(+44) 871.075.0336
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Our client, one of the large preschool systems in the Republic of Croatia, asked us to help it improve the user experience of early and preschool education stakeholders. The stakeholders include parents, guardians and their children as system users, as well as all professional pedagogical staff, educators and other relevant actors. Modern trends and needs have induced us to look for the solution to the challenge of stakeholder communication in a digital system that would address the users’ actual needs. In the project, we sought to arrive at the solution using the so-called bottom-up approach, actively involving users in the solution design process, to ensure that the right needs are addressed and the final solution accepted.
We started from the real needs of the system’s stakeholders. By conducting in-depth (empathic) interviews, we strived to gain a thorough understanding of the broader picture of the needs and challenges faced by principals, professional staff, educators, parents, children and children with special needs. In addition to the interviews, we studied numerous materials and explored similar practices worldwide in order to, among other things, get an insight into how preschool education is perceived as a profession.
Many data collected needed to be sorted out and graphically displayed. Based on previously observed processes and stakeholder interactions we drew up a map of strengths and challenges for each individual stakeholder to facilitate the identification of opportunities for the optimization of user and service provider experience. The users were represented by several different personality types, serving as archetypes of parents in the role of kindergarten service users. The manner of service use was also devised to better understand user behavior in individual stages and situations.
In order to include all stakeholders in solution development, the ideation process involved a series of workshops for parents and focus groups consisting of experts from the preschool system. In the process, more than 100 creative ideas were collected and 50 points that would improve the experience of all stakeholders identified. The initial challenge was narrowed down by co-creation and reaching a consensus about the insights of all stakeholders, with a mobile application that adequately improves communication between parents and the preschool system emerging as the solution.
A digital solution required a digital prototype. The first step in its development was its co-creation by the Prokotip design team, experts and end-users. We defined potential functions and the desirable content of the mobile application together, and subsequently translated our findings into a clickable prototype.
The clickable prototype was tested by more than 30 parents, i.e. potential application users, several prototype iterations were devised and retested, until the final version was obtained that met the core needs of users and service providers alike.
The project was finalized with the handover of a functional ready-to-code mobile application specification. The functional specification describes the future digital solution in detail on the functional level, includes a developed clickable prototype, user flow that predicts potential user steps and screen flow which maps key elements.
