Hopinoy is a mobile application that helps parents to organize ride-share for their children to their activities (school or extra-school activities).
The Company
The name of Hopinoy comes from:
- “Hopi” which is the name of a native American tribe whose values were peace, kindness, mutual aid, brotherhood and community — and these are values the company wants to convey — AND
- “noy” which means “digital” in Hawaian.
So the idea of Hopinoy is to create a “digital tribe”.
The Brief
Hopinoy mobile application was released on Septembre 2018.
There has been 150 downloads, 90 accounts created, but no activity.
The company wanted to understand why and how to change this.
The Process
User Research
My first step was to send 2 quick surveys: one to current members of the app and the second, to parents who had children going to school.
The 5 interviews of parents I made gave me more insights and showed that there is a big stress to entrust someone outside the family to drop or pick up the kids.
Benchmark
A few mobile applications also propose ride-sharing service for children: Pédibus, Zouzoucar…
Almost all apps show features of group or community and offer the possibility to see profiles of members at any time, which is clearly missing in Hopinoy.
Persona
Based on the data collected during the user research, let me introduce my persona: Carole, who has 2 kids, Paul, 10, and Emilie, 4.
User Journey
It’s monday, Carole is at work and has just learned that she will have an interview at 16:00 next Thursday. But Thursday is also the day she has to take her elder son Paul to his football training. Her colleague tells her about Hopinoy. Carole downloads the app and creates her account, then tries to figure out how the app works. She has difficulties to use the app and at the end, she can’t find any match. So the app didn’t help.
Statement
How may we help Carole to find entrusted parents to help her taking her children to activities?
The current app
The current app looks clean but actually, as tested and said in surveys, it is not easy to use.
There are wording problems right on the first page. After creating the journey schedule, we don’t know what the figures next to each activity stand for.
Another big issue is that users can’t see any other user profiles in the app until there is a match. And if there is no match, they can never see other users. They feel alone.
We now understand better why people don’t use the app:
- difficult to understand how it works
- some wording problems
- few users, few matchings
- impossible to see information about other users without having a match
Ideation and solution
As the goal of Hopinoy is to build a “Digital tribe”, we have to bring back the idea of groups or community in the app.
What do parents have in common and may gather the community? Places (school, activity centers…). So, the community should start from there.
My goal was to review the process of creating a journey so that to include the places as a standalone entity (and not linked to an address).
Moodboard
We have seen from the user research, that parents are looking for trust, solidarity. I also wanted to add the idea of care as we are talking about children, and serenity as parents usually feel unsecure to leave their kids to someone else.
I wanted all these values to be reflected in the moodboard:
Styleguide
Regarding the style guide, I picked up relaxing colors like the blue and turquoise. Blue is the color of trust.
I used plain icons as they appear more stable.
The prototype
Testing
Wednesday is the perfect day to find some real target users for testing my prototype as it is activity day for children. So, I went to a gymnasium where children play different sports.
In guerilla mode, I showed the concept and the prototype to 5 parents (1 dad, 4 mums). They all find the concept interesting.
PROS
- Clear process, easy to understand
- Feeling of security (control of documents…)
- Possibility to see the members of a group
CONS
- Only 1 user out of 5 think she could use this kind of app
- Clarify some wording
Brand personality
The brand personality was perceived as:
friendly — family-oriented — reliable — confident — daring
Next steps
- Make the Hopinoy community grow and add social or Invite Friends CTA buttons all through the app (right after creating the profile or right after creating a journey…)
- Create other communities that are not linked to places (for example: just a group of parents, or associations…)
