Hopn

Project Overview

Hopn is a start-up that offers parents rides for their children. It aims to use technology to connect parents with certified caregivers to provide safe and reliable rides.

My Contribution

As the sole UX Designer, I led designing the core experience for a responsive webapp (that we assume most users will use on their mobile phones) for both parents and caregivers. For the purpose of this case study, I will focus on the research and development done for parents as users. Due to budgetary constraints we had to purposefully prioritize core features while backlogging "nice-to-have" features for a later version.

The Problem

Parents are busier

‍Parents are busier than ever and working parents often have schedules that conflict with their children's transport needs.

44% of parents say that managing their child’s school and extracurricular transportation is more stressful than filing their taxes.
27% of parents feel like they have put their job at risk in order to meet their child’s transportation needs.
35% of parents say their work schedule is affected at least once a week due to having to shuttle their kids around.

Schools are further away

More districts are offering families the option to choose from among public schools regardless of their geographic proximity to home.

‍There are now over 6,000 charter schools enrolling nearly 3 million students nationwide.

School districts are struggling to provide efficient service in the face of escalating costs where more students attend schools outside their neighborhoods.

Factors such as a shortage of qualified bus drivers and fuel market volatility further complicate these matters.

Alternatives are difficult to discover

‍It is hard for parents to discover reliable carpool groups and when they do, figuring out the logistics of who drives when can be a tedious.

‍"I know that my 8-year-old is going to be at school or camp with a friend. We know who the families are who are going to be at these activities, but actually figuring out the carpool is complicated."

User Research & Insights

Based on what we knew about the problem, I wanted to get an even deeper understanding of the parent's behaviours, pain points, motivations and expectations, when arranging rides for their children (whether it was with a friend, family or carpool group).

To do this, I conducted face-to-face interviews and contextual inquiries on a handful of parents trying to arrange rides for their child.

After analyzing the gathered data, I was able to better understand what were important to parents and what made it so difficult for them to arrange rides for their kids. Below are the main themes I uncovered:

Not an ideal discovery process

‍Parents pick who drive their child based on who they know or other parents who are available.
When asked, parents say that an ideal situation is where they are able to pick someone who has a good driving track record, child care experience and whose credentials are checked out. However, they simply do not have that luxury.

Tedious planning process

Parents are using tools like SMS, Whatsapp and Excel to organize and coordinate carpools.
The back and forth that is involved in planning rides and updating Excel sheets takes time and patience.

Communication or the lack thereof

As a result of using tools like SMS and Whatsapp, finer details about a child's transport needs and can get lost such as pick-up and drop-off notes or even a child's allergies and other needs.
Parents are left in the dark about the immediate status of a child's ride (like if the child is dropped off in time)
Different parents have different expectations for how their child should be picked-up, driven, dropped-off or even disciplined. And because it is a difficult topic to approach other parents, friends or family members about, they are sometimes left unaddressed until a major incident arises.

So, what was a common theme among all the insights?

Overall, we observed that it was not only hard for parents to find people to drive their children, however, throughout the whole experience it was hard for them to balance efficiency, safety and reliability.

Concepts & Testing

After making sense of the data gathered, I wanted to quickly test various design ideas. And so, I created low-fidelity wire frames in the form of paper prototypes for rapid testing. We then conducted a usability test in the form of a cognitive walkthrough with a handful of parents. During the test, parents had to interact with the paper prototypes, talk-a-loud about what they were doing, and were interviewed about their experience. Below are aspects about the system we were testing:

Experience when completing various tasks

(measured mental load using NASA Task Load Index)

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Overall IA

(findability and discoverability)

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Different dashboard views
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The taxonomy of the different ride status’

Part of the conceptualization stage also included a workflow/sitemap of the system as can be seen below:

Simple, Straight forward set-up

Parents are busy and want to get straight to scheduling.

So, we wanted HopN’s setup to be as minimal as possible, while concentrating on absolute essentials like emergency contact information to ensure safety.

Thoughtful ride setup to ensure everything is accounted for

We know parents have to care about a lot of little details when passing someone else their child. To lighten their mental load, we wanted to parents plenty of opportunities to send all this information in a structured way:

Usage of arrival time vs pick-up time to assure parents that drivers know to be punctual.
Notes of any special requirements per child (Including allergies, booster seat requirements, ability of a child to ride in the front seat)
Pick-up and drop-off notes per ride.

Information that provides assurances

We wanted to build an end-to-end experience where parents are continuously assured through over communication and immediate access to all the information that matter to them the most. I always kept that in mind and incorporated it in a variety of ways including the examples below:

Statistics of a driver’s punctuality rating and any history with last minute cancellations.
A link to Hopn's driver guidelines.
Reviews of a driver from other parents helps build trust.
Comprehensive driver profile including checks conducted and car details.
Thorough end-to-end SMS notifications for every step of your child’s ride (child picked-up, dropped-off, signed in, etc)

“Nice-to-have” features that were put on the backlog

There were many other feature enhancements that would have made sense to incorporate based on the insights collectected. However, because of budgetary constraints, we had to put the following features on the backlog. These features that would have had to be further tested included:

Scheduling recurring rides (Parents need regular rides for their children as opposed to on-demand like on Uber and Lyft)
Calendar Dashboard View (Parents start noticing they have a need for a ride when there is a clash in their calendar. If we had their main calendar sync with an in-app calendar, showing clashes in their schedule, we would made the process more efficient and anticipated the needs of parents.)
Live tracking of a child’s ride (Because we were building HopN’s MVP on a webapp due to budgetary constraints, we unfortunately could not build out this feature)
In app messaging (Although communication was a very important piece, this feature was out of budget, and so after matching the parent and the driver, we would let both parties know that their numbers have been released so they can contact each other if needed)

Hopn

Let's connect

I am always looking to connect with like minded individuals and for feedback on my thoughts and work. Feel free to email me at

sarah9393@gmail.com