Overview

Wooden toys have never really gone out of fashion, rather they have been overlooked with so many varied and easily available plastic toys which end up in the landfill for many years causing a threat to our ecosystem.

elf crate brings back the tradition of introducing wooden toys to your child through a subscription service that can help in your child’s developmental miles stones and in building up an eco-friendly community.

Role & Duration

Product Designer | Team project (3 people)

Client: Sunnyvale community
UX Research, Wireframes, UI design, Usability study, Prototype, Testing
2 months

Tools: Paper, Pen, Adobe XD, Mira, Illustrator, Photoshop, Google meet

Solution

A community-based program that can empathize with the parents by making the wooden toy rental, easy and affordable for them to fulfill their kid’s needs whenever he/she craves a new toy.
Through this program, we intend to create a knowledgeable source about the environment and also a reliable source for good sanitization with safer and healthy play for kids.

| Concept

Being a parent I spent a lot of money on my kid’s toys, later on realizing it was all in vain as they tend to lose interest quickly ending up with a pile of toys at home. The first toy that I bought for my kid was wooden blocks and even after 8 years, they are still my kid’s first choice when he gets bored of other plastic toys since it stimulates his creative thinking.

With the above thoughts in mind, when Sunnyvale community center approached me to create a website for a toy rental program for them that can help to pioneer a child’s imagination and creative side at a very early age, and also be instrumental in promoting the green concept. Also, It should be more rewardable for reducing waste, promoting sharing, and reducing carbon footprint.

Empathize

With a lot of e-commerce websites being there in the market, we started to narrow down some of the toy-sharing websites and even some wooden toy subscription services and tried to pin down some of the hitches that need to be addressed and revamp them to make our idea of wooden toy sharing more influential.

Our user research started with some surveys with the sole purpose of knowing our targeted users who are a part of such programs and also will be interested in the future. The survey questionnaire helped us in processing their thoughts, opinions, requirements, and frustrations which can be a strong foundation for our product.

| Empathy map

An empathy map helps to align us on a deep understanding of end-users visualizing user attitudes and behaviors. The mapping process also reveals any holes in existing user data.

Define

With all the data from the empathy map, we tried to build a user persona that can help us make better design decisions considering the user's needs. We were able to interpret the user journey to get to know their feelings at each stage of their experience to accomplish the tasks.

Ideate

After knowing the market analysis, we did some brainstorming with all the user research considerations which stimulated our creative thinking by generating ideas to solve and categorize clearly defined design problems with user story boards.

| Site map

We outlined the user flow using a site map to get a better understanding of how users can efficiently navigate through our website to subscribe to our wooden toy rental plans.

Wireframes & Prototype

We started sketching the paper wireframes conceptualizing the whole idea of the product as it makes it easy to do any changes or iterations without putting a lot of effort. Sharing the low fidelity wireframes created using the paper ones with clients made it easy for them to visualize the product in a more practical way.

Testing

As a part of usability testing, we conducted some workshops to get to know the efficiency of our website prototype and also to know our targeted user’s feedback while navigating through my website and accomplishing some tasks.

| Key insights from usability tests

• Displaying the transparency in providing detailed information about the companies vision and its objectives.

• Giving enough information on the whole process of sanitization of the toys can help in build customer satisfaction and reliability.

• Having an option for the child with special needs might make the website more accessible to a wide range of users. 

| Brand guide

Impact

• The website really makes it easy for the parents to subscribe to a monthly rental crate kit for their kids with automatic monthly reminders.

• First month trial period makes it more convincing for the parents to try out our program that might build customer confidence.

• One of the quotes from feedback: "The concept itself is more captivating and is a great idea in enhancing a child’s development in a more safe and healthy environment. The website looks stunning and very simply laid out."

Learnings

• When it comes to developing a concept related to kids It’s always important to know the pros and cons in order to make it more reliable for the users to get involved.

• User research, Market Research, and peer feedback definitely helped me know the possibilities of success of my concept and even changed my perspectives on how users would go about choosing something for their child’s development.

• This project really convinced me to think about making my kid’s developmental play safe and healthy which includes educating them about the environment.

Future Goals

• Making the website mobile responsive associated with the community programs.

• My client wants to collaborate with the local wooden toy vendors as a gratitude to the community and spread the concept of being environment-friendly around the city.

• Conducting more workshops with the intention of familiarizing our product beyond the community and also to know more about our product’s efficiency and its success among our potential users. 

• Extending our research study towards incorporating more features that can make the website more accessible to kids with special needs and also some easy learnings to educate parents and kids about how they can contribute towards global warming.