A streamlined and intuitive platform for Clubs Complete, a nationwide activity company

Clubs Complete had two key objectives. Firstly, improve sales through an engaging, conversion-led website and secondly, ensure a smooth user experience for all key stakeholders – parents, teachers and school administrators.

Building a complex bespoke platform, giving all users a streamlined experience.

We also built a comprehensive booking platform that addressed the needs of two specific user personas – parents and administrators. 

The Parents: upon registration and email confirmation, (this additional confirmation helps to avoid bot signups), parents are asked to share key information about their kids. Details include, address (if different), doctors, school and consent preferences. 

The user is then invited to search for sessions in their local area. From here they can easily register their child(ren) for multiple sessions, pay, switch sessions, cancel and generally manage the account.

The Administrators: teachers, school administrators or other organisers have access to their own back-end experience which allows them to track bookings, manage activities, check the capacity of each session and review payments.

The Real Challenge

This is where an ‘edge case’ comes in. Whilst this reads as a straightforward project, it’s these edge cases that add complexity. 

Edge Case – a problem or situation, especially in computer programming, that only happens at the highest or lowest end of a range of possible values or in extreme situations.

An ‘ideal’ situation is as follows ‘two kids, two parents who are still together, full payment for the sessions online’. However there are so many other factors to consider, here are some of the questions that came up in the edge cases we worked on.

Alternative Logins: if the parents of the child(ren) are divorced, both parents will need to log in and access the information and data of the kids. How can we link those accounts together? What if a Grandparent wants to pay for the session? Can we add another user and link it to a child’s profile? 

Payments: we also had to consider payments. Some children receive full funding to attend after-school clubs, how could that be managed and linked to the correct kids? Some receive part funding, which means a parent/guardian would need to log in and pay the remaining balance, what processes could we put in place to ensure the money went to the right places?

Cancellations: in the case of a last-minute cancellation, we built a user flow to tackle this process. How much notice would a parent have to give to receive their money back? How quickly could a school fill that spot? Did all the notifications and emails push through on time? 

Safeguarding: on top of all this, safeguarding was imperative. Who has access to the data? Who is informed and responsible for the kids? We don’t want kids left at school because sessions were cancelled and the parents didn’t know… To address this we built a failsafe into the system to help safeguard and protect every child. 

Whilst this project was incredibly challenging, we learned a lot. And, thanks to our use of the kaizen methodology we’ve been able to take our learnings and easily adapt our processes and plans to incorporate them for future projects.