Interface2016Co-founder, product and designShipped

ChildsPass

A credits-based marketplace for children's activities — co-founded in Da Nang, grown to 600 partner locations in six months, and designed down to the screens nobody screenshots.

Product designiOSMarketplace

Three ChildsPass onboarding screens, each showing a short explanation card — Browse, Reserve, Top-up and Manage — overlaid on the real screen it describes rather than on an illustration.

ChildsPass was a marketplace for children's activities — swimming, drama, soccer, arts and craft — bought with credits rather than per class. I co-founded it in Da Nang in 2015 and it went from zero to around 600 partner locations in six months. I did the product and the interface.

Teaching the app on the app

The onboarding is four steps, and each one sits on top of the screen it is describing: Browse over the real class list, Reserve over a real class detail, Attend over the map, Top-up & Manage over the credits screen. Nobody learns an interface from a carousel of illustrations they will never see again, and the pattern costs nothing — the screens already exist, so the tutorial is a scrim and a card.

The credits model, shown honestly

Credits are the whole commercial mechanic, and they are genuinely fiddly: a monthly plan balance that expires, a separate topped-up balance that expires on a different date, and recharge bundles with their own 30-day window. It would have been easier to display one number. The screen instead shows both balances with both expiry dates, because a parent who loses credits they thought they had does not come back, and a single reassuring total is the design that causes that.

The cancel dialog

Cancelling states the rule before it asks: cancelling must take place 10 days prior to your next billing, then a second confirmation. Subscription products routinely bury that clause where it will be discovered too late. Putting it in the destructive dialog is worse for short-term retention and better for everything else, and I would make the same call now.

What it looks like, and when

This is 2016 iOS — flat, blue-forward, pre-iOS-11 type — and it looks it. The parts worth reading are structural rather than stylistic: colour as a carried taxonomy, tab labels holding live counts, empty states with an exit, a two-stage destructive confirmation with the policy attached, and a partner-side web funnel with a multi-step onboarding form built alongside the consumer app. It was the first product I designed end to end, and the habits in it are the ones I still work by.

A cancellation dialog with a red header reading 'Are you sure?', the sentence 'Cancelling must take place 10 days prior to your next billing', a second red prompt reading 'Really?', and No and Yes buttons. — The cancel dialog states the billing rule before it asks again. Two stages, and the consequence in plain words — a dark pattern would have hidden the ten-day clause here.

An available-credits screen showing a monthly plan balance of 150 credits with an expiry date, a separate top-up balance of 80 credits with a different expiry, a recharge option of 120 credits for $89.95 with a 30-day expiry, the current subscription tier, and a cancel subscription link. — Two balances, two expiry dates, one screen. Plan credits and topped-up credits behave differently, so the interface admits it instead of showing one comforting total.