Case Study: Planet Kids
In February 2008 Planet Kids, the largest private summer camp in Ontario serving over 4000 families, relaunched their website with all kinds of features to help parents enroll their children in camp for the coming March break and summer camps. Interactive bus maps, real-time camp availability, online payment options, camp photo galleries, and more were included with the new design.
Planetkids.ca homepage after the February 2008 Launch
Challenge:
Planet Kids needed a way for parents to register their children into the 60 different summer camps offered. The process was complex: For every camp there were all kinds of options that could be added including busing, lunch options, sleepovers, extended care, and more. Each child in the family could register for multiple camps over the course of a year, and information (age, allergies, etc.) needed to be collected for every child registered so that the staff could care for them properly.
Busing information for Kelso Camp
Solution:
We needed to come up with a system that could accommodate this massive process. Essentially, we built a shopping cart that assigned products (the camps) to several shopping baskets (the children) and each product had to made to order (busing, lunch options, extended care, and more) and it had to be simple.
During the pre-production phase we evaluated and re-evaluated every piece of data Planet Kids intended to collect. Input from staff and parents helped us determine the best way to process the giant amount of data for each family. We quickly realized that too many questions would alienate a lot of users. We decided to build in checkpoints so that questions were only asked to parents if it was relevant to their children and the camps they were enrolling in.
At the end of the project we had a shopping cart that could meet all of the needs parents had while registering and we got them through the process as quickly and painlessly as possible.
The new registration system for Planet Kids