Making the Community Platform easier for parents

The user experience for parents on the CoderDojo community platform has been less than stellar in the past. We recognise this, and we’re working towards making it easier to get onto the platform and actively use it. I want to share with you the first steps we’ve taken to achieve this, and what we plan to do moving forward to address the issues parents are hitting now.

New “My Children” page

You may have seen in the last couple of months that we’ve rolled out a new My Children page, where you can get an overview of all your children’s progress. It’s basic at the moment, showing the Dojos your child is a member of, and the recent badges they’ve been awarded. You can also manage what Dojos your child is a member of. We want to expand this with more information that you want to see, so please give us your feedback over on our forums.

Making adding children easier

The next thing we wanted to tackle is actually adding your children in the first place. It’s pretty cumbersome as it is now. The option is buried in the edit profile page; There are separate buttons for over 13s and under 13s, even though we can tell which your child is from their date of birth; You have to fill out the City and Country again, even though they’re most likely going to match yours. To top it all off, it was confusing, with headers such as “Your Details” despite us really looking for your child’s details. With all this in hand, we opted to scrap the old form and write a new, significantly simpler one from the ground up. It’s much simpler, only asking for the details we actually need, and it’s much more discoverable. A new “My Children” option will appear for all users in their profile drop-down, and a clear option to add a child will be visible.

What’s next?

These are great first steps, and we hope this will greatly help users get started. Our future plans build upon this goal. We intend on completely redesigning the registration flow, prompting new users to add their children if they have any, join their local Dojo, and book into their first event. We’re also going to fix some of the issues around existing flows, like when you try to register after clicking to book an event. When you’re finished with registration in this scenario, there should be prompts to join the Dojo you’re trying to book into and to finalise the booking.

Dojo admins, don’t worry, we haven’t forgotten about you! Look out for improvements to our various Dojo management pages, coming soon.

We’re a small team, but we’re working hard to figure out and implement these improvements. It may take us time, but rest assured, user experience is a huge priority for us. The best way we can identify issues is if you, the users, tell us about them. You can post in the Community Platform Discussion forum with any feedback you have, and we’d love if you could post any feedback on the new My Children page in our dedicated thread here.

Thank you for all your feedback so far. Keep it coming, and keep being awesome!

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