Online Service Marketplace for PlanMyKids
Learn how Codica helped a customer build an intuitive online marketplace for parents for booking after-school activities for kids.
Domain:Leisure
Location:Raleigh, North Carolina, USA
Timeline:November 2020 - March 2021
Services:Product discovery, Prototyping,UX/UI design services, Front-end and Back-end development,PWA development,MVP development
Team:1 Project Manager/Business Analyst, 1 UX/UI Designer, 2 Backend Developers, 1 Frontend Developer, 1 Devops, 1 QA Engineer.
Core Technologies:Ruby on Rails, React, Redis, AWS
Client review
David Watkins, Founder of PlanMyKids
“The PlanMyKids journey started when my family struggled to plan our own kid’s activities while not in school. As busy parents, we were time-constrained, the information we needed was all over the place, and coordinating with family and friends felt like it required a project management certification.
After talking with other parents it turned out that many felt the same way. We felt we could change the status quo by creating a care-free, personalized, trusted digital service to connect parents and program providers.”
Background
The project is a simple personalized online booking platform for booking leisure activities for children. With its help, parents are able to find initiatives that match their children’s interests and easily coordinate their activities.
The main goal of the product is to connect parents with the providers of kids activities nearby and free them from stress that comes with planning, purchasing, and attending such activities.
Business challenges
- Build an MVP to help the customer reduce risks associated with custom marketplace development. The MVP approach allows meeting the basic kids activities marketplace requirements without investing too much money.
- Create a personalized service marketplace to connect parents with providers of kids’ activities.
- Create a user-friendly online marketplace for parents that would run smoothly on both desktop and mobile devices.
- Find the most suitable way to collect users’ data to provide them with a great variety of activities for children that fall under specific criteria.
Value delivered
- Delivered a service marketplace MVP under budget which was crucial for a bootstrapping company. It helped customer test value proposition and marketing message.
- Helped the customer narrow down the MVP features for activity booking marketplace which were brought to life through prototypes. This way, the customer stayed focused on the main MVP goals without being distracted on fancy functionality.
- Created a children’s leisure online planner. The platform allows parents to find after-school activities based on kids’ interests, family preferences, and budget. The platform has convenient account management and administrative dashboards. They allow parents to plan the activities for children and coordinate them with family and friends.
- Built a cross-platform progressive web application that provides users with enhanced mobile experience. The PWA technology also helped the customer save costs on mobile app development.
“I really enjoyed working on the project! Thanks to great David’s ideas, our close cooperation and his trust in our expertise, we were able to quickly deliver a user-friendly and useful online service marketplace.
As usual, our main goal was to create a logical product workflow based on specific business objectives and coordinate it with the customer. The best thing about this project is that effective communication and mutual trust allowed us to turn the initial idea into a working solution within just a few months.”
Eugenia
Project Manager at Codica
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Talk to an expertSolution delivered
Smart online booking platform
The kids activities marketplace is noted for its smooth and straightforward workflow. Parents fill in the questionnaire and send it to review. The system automatically finds relevant activities based on their children’s interests. Program specialists review automatic suggestions, form an itinerary and send it to parents.
Progressive web application
Since a huge part of users engage with the website on a mobile app, we aimed to provide them with a rich user experience without them having to download amobile app marketplace. The PWA technology is a perfect way to achieve this. Therefore we built a fast-loading progressive web application for this activity booking marketplace. The app is cross platform and provides a seamless experience for both Android and iPhone users.
UX and UI design
Since our task was to build a child-focused activity booking marketplace, we intended to make it less formal. For this purpose, we added little icons to the web pages that remind children’ sloppy drawings. Also, we built a funny and cute 404 error page. Finally, we paid special attention to typography. We chose two types of fonts. Serif was used for headlines and Sans Serif - for longer copy to improve readability.
Easy web forms with Zoho integration
The integration with Zoho Forms allowed building mobile-friendly online forms. They were used to make the questionnaire and sign-up forms very easy to fill in even for smartphone users. With its help, parents can submit the initial questionnaire quickly and effortlessly.
Convenient itinerary management
We focused on making itinerary management easy for both parents and program specialists. Thus, specialists can search for camps available and filter the results based on dates, age, price, and activities. Also, they can view short descriptions of courses to offer parents the most relevant options. As soon as the relevant camps are added, and the itinerary is formed, it can be sent to parents.
Calendar for parents
With this online booking platform functionality, parents can view all planned itineraries. Also, they can choose child/children whose itinerary they want to view. This way, parents will always have their kids’ schedule at their fingertips and never miss an important event.
How it works
The video below shows a detailed platform user flow for parents. It walks you through the key stages of the activity booking process from filling in the questionnaire to receiving a personalized itinerary.
Technologies
React
Rails API
AWS
Redux
Sidekiq
Redis
Gitlab CI
Integrations
Zoho
Stripe
Google APIs
FB login
“Working with the Codica team has been a great experience. All the value we thought they would provide during the selection process was met during the delivery.
Our team spent a good time working with a parent focus group to narrow down our MVP features which Codica brought to life through prototypes. When we got too ambitious with features, Codica team helped ground us with reminders of our MVP goals.
In the end Codica delivered our online service marketplace MVP under budget, which for a bootstrapped company was important.”
David Watkins
Founder of PlanMyKids
Let’s build a great custom product together!
What’s next?
- 1. Our Sales Manager Taya will be in touch with you within 1 business day.
- 2. We will sign the NDA if required, and start the project discussion.
- 3. Our custom software development experts will analyze your requirements and suggest the best ways to bring your idea to life.
