OVERVIEW

ActiveKids is the largest activity site for kids on the planet!

Active Kids helps moms and dads who struggle to find, organize, and register their children for events and activities. Parents can easily search from more than 440,000 events & activities for camps, extra-curricular classes, and other types of activities that would interest their children. The robust database can also recommend activities that are nearby and most relevant based on each child’s interests.

Launching ActiveKids.com

We wanted to move our business into the rapidly expanding and underserved market of local children's activities. ACTIVEKids was born after market research and user interviews revealed a growing market for kid-friendly local activities. The site and app was quickly executed by building upon the proven design framework of ACTIVE.com (with some fun new features for parents.) The site quickly generated several hundred thousand dollars of new business in it's first 6 months.

MY ROLE:
User Experience Lead, Prototyper

TEAM MEMBERS:
PM: Summer Hogsed
DEV: Nathaniel Barnes
VISUAL: Brandon Swonger, Chad Poorman, Arielle McMahon
GCD/ACD: Margaret Cyphers, Corwin Stone

Case Study

Tailor the activity-search experience specifically to parents looking for hyper-local events and age-appropriate activities for their kids with improved on-boarding tools.

RESEARCH
The team conducted focus groups and asked parents how they found local events for their children, and how the process could be improved. Parents repeatedly told us the site was difficult to navigate and they didn't understand the requirements. The parents we interviewed had very specific, and surprising, criteria when looking for activities for their children. 

Some noteworthy findings that influenced our design decisions:

"I need to find activities within a few miles of my home. Location is very important."
"I am more likely to register my kids for an activity if one of my friends' kids is participating too."
"I would like to find something that both of my kids (different ages / genders) can participate in together."
"I am only interested in events that look trustworthy."
"I need to help deciding what activities my kid would be good at."

In the end, our user interviews found 84 parent/child-specific criteria that became the backlog of Activekids.com site and app.

We also created personas for parents and children, and expanded the site's existing Information Architecture to include the top categories of children's activities.

DESIGN
The design process started with sketching solutions to improve parents ability to find 1) activities specifically tailored to their children and 2) activities located near their actual home (not just city, state.) 

After sketching, wireframes and an interactive prototype were created to test the onboarding process for both desktop and mobile.

Mobile app wireframes

While we strive to keep the user-facing experience as simple as possible, the behind-the-scenes flow for capturing and storing the new user data (for new users, exisiting signed-out users, and existing signed-in users) can get quite complex!

The onboarding tools as launched, allowing parents to add their family members as well as their home address.

The on-boarding tools were also launched on the iOS app

RESULTS
The launch of ActiveKids brought generated over 500k new visitors to Active products. In the first year, tens of thousands of users added family and home address information to the site, tailoring the experience and increasing conversion to registration pages.

PRODUCT SCREENSHOTS