Roles

June 2018 – June 2020

Lead Developer · Full-Time · London, UK

Jan 2016 – June 2018

Android / React / Django Developer · Consultant · London, UK

Situation

Families see the power of getting out of the house from the earliest moments of their children's lives. The opportunity to laugh, make new friends, learn new skills, explore passions or spend quality time together improves outcomes. But parents often struggle to find new things going on for kids.

Opportunity

In search of fun things to do, parents waste time wading through the mess of parenting forums, local notice boards and websites. There is an opportunity for a service that makes it easier to discover what's on for kids and Hoop is unravelling this mess, making parenting that little bit easier.

Solution

Hoop is a marketplace that inspires, educate and entertain children out of the home. It's split between a consumer app called Hoop for Families – that makes it easy to find, share and book activities – and the business web platform named Hoop for Organisers – that lets companies create, manage and promote children's activities.

As a small team, together, we explored solutions to solve needs for our users and opportunities for the business. We made use of the office walls to organise project materials, create stories, define requirements and encourage participation from everyone. We created three personas based on age groups to help us understand their needs, experiences, behaviours and goals. We ran workshops to determine information architecture for the app and journey maps for families and organisers.

The main products I've worked on were:

• Hoop Website: the business facade with a built-in search engine and checkout system.

• Hoop for Organisers Website: a platform targeted to organisers, to create and manage activities, contact customers and much more.

• Hula: a content management system used by our internal team to find local activities.

• The consumer Android application.

Each project (except apps) is the result of the composition of several services talking to each other. I wouldn't call them micro and I am ok with it, because part of the business domain is still to be discovered and it's better to delay unnecessary complexity.

I was able to make an impact on all of this and spent countless evenings trying to figure out problems over my skill level. I've learned a lot, it's been 4 beautiful years at Hoop.

Impact

One of the UK's most loved family apps with 1.4 million installs and over 13 thousand activity organisers of all sizes, from small, franchises and world-renowned institutions such as The V&A and the British Museum to help promote their families programmes.

The BBC, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Evening Standard, and Wired are just some of the publications that have featured Hoop — also on the NHS apps' library and promoted through health visitors around the country. Oh, we also got awarded best app of the Apple App Store in two consecutive years, 2016 and 2017.