Tot Spot

Empowering motherhood, one tot at a time.

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Inspiration

According to Child Care Aware of America, the average cost of center-based daycare exceeds 40% of a single mother's median income in most states, creating a significant financial strain. Finding affordable and reliable childcare is a growing challenge for parents nationwide, especially for single parents who rely on a single income. We recognize the unique hurdles working parents face, such as the high costs and limited availability of childcare, and the need to juggle demanding work schedules with parenting responsibilities. Our goal is to empower and support working mothers by providing resources and solutions that ease the burden of finding and affording quality childcare.

What it does

Tot Spot allows users to input their credentials, child care needs, and scheduling information. Using this information our website returns a list of daycare options with prices catered to each user's needs, allowing them to make the most informed choice for their child. We also included ratings for the daycares surrounding us, allowing parents to make the most informed decisions for childcare.

How we built it

We used Figma for prototyping and deciding project structure, Canva for logos/designs, and JavaScript, HTML, and Tailwind CSS through Next.js to build the website implementation.

Challenges we ran into

We came across most of our obstacles in the initial planning stage. We debated creating a website application versus a mobile application and what would be more useful for our users. Ultimately, we decided that a website would allow for more UX/UI complexity and easier navigation for our target demographic.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our seamless navigation and minimalistic yet aesthetic UI is an accomplishment we're most proud of. The website was designed specifically so our users are not overwhelmed with information presented on the screen, and can intuitively navigate through the site with ease. Some of the best features are the most subtle ones, for example the text animation that appears upon loading the site. Or if you hover over the daycare logos, they animate to enlarge. These subtle differences we feel the user makes mental notes of, allowing for a cleaner feel of our overall website that would encourage the user to return next time.

What we learned

Through our prototyping phase, we learned a lot more about Figma's interaction features as well as page routing between frames. Whether it was the user input fields or something simpler like button placement, figma allowed us to test various versions of our final product. Even though we didn't end up implementing them as designed, it served as a useful canvas for the overall project. Web development was also new to many of our team members, and we learned a lot about coding in VS code with JavaScript.

What's next for Tot Spot

Currently, our daycare database is hardcoded. However, in the future we hope to use an API to access data on trusted daycare services across the nation. We also plan to add an authentication feature to create a more secure profile space for our users and a financial calculator for parents to calculate estimate costs associated with child care when they plan to opt into our program!

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