HiMama: Lesson Planner

A daycare app with a reimagined lesson planner designed to help educators with their classroom lesson planning with the ease and flexibility of adding set curriculum activities as well as custom ones.

Timeline
10 months

In collaboration with
Product Manager
Engineering team of 6

My role
Design Lead
Research
Wireframes
Figma Specs
QA Testing

Context
HiMama is an all-in-one daycare app dedicated to providing quality childcare. In pursuit of this goal, they acquired FunShine, a curriculum content creator, aiming to seamlessly integrate research-based curriculum within the app. This also served as an opportunity to recreate the planner improving its functionality and transforming it into a more user-friendly, valuable tool for educators.

The Problem
Educators face challenges in quickly and easily creating lesson plans using the existing daycare planner.

• existing activity planner is buggy, inflexible and confusing
• doesn’t support curriculum activities
• doesn’t allow for activities to have more than 1 developmental marker
• creating a lesson plan is a time-consuming, manual process for educators

The Goal
Provide educators with a more flexible lesson planner.

• offer access to a set of developmentally appropriate curriculum lessons that can be added to the planner 
• give educators more freedom in developing their weekly lesson plans (a mix of custom and curriculum activities)
• allow 3 developmental markers to be added to activities
• make the lesson planner flexible and easy-to-use
• achieve a 60% increase in planner usage within the first 6 months

The Research

Current state audit

• conducted a current state audit of the existing activity planner to determine what was working well, what wasn’t and where there were opportunities for improvement (ie. analyzing usage data, customer feedback and product requests)

• explored features in competitive products and drew inspiration from analogous experiences

User interviews

• conducted user interviews with 6 educators and directors to learn more about their day-to-day, their lesson planning processes, how they would prioritize feature improvements

Key findings

• curriculums are widely used and supplemented with custom educator-created activities
• curriculum must be flexible, customizable and developmentally age appropriate
• curriculum helps give educators time back in their busy day
• lesson plans are typically created weekly, printed and posted inside the classroom for licensing purposes
• educators find being able to ty indicators to specific activities crucial to tracking child development
• educators want the ability to duplicate and modify activities to tailor them to the specific needs of their classroom

Story mapping

• mapped out the lesson planning process based on conversations with educators and directors
• outlined the actions required to complete the steps in the lesson planning process

Designs

• developed a set of mocks using HiMama’s visual design system and the workflows and wireframes
• collaborated with the lead engineer on the final specs
• shared the finalized designs with the team, along with the specs
• performed a round of QA to ensure the build matched the designs

The Impact

• increased planner usability and customization, contributing to higher satisfaction among educators and directors
• achieved 80% adoption of the curriculum feature within 3 months, with most educators integrating the activities into their daily routines
• generated a new stream of annual recurring revenue