We helped Kaymbu design & build an iPad app and web service that lets parents see into their child’s classroom.

Story

In February of 2013 Kin Lo, a recent MIT Sloan graduate, approached us with an inspiring idea to improve communication between preschools and parents. Kin had done market research but needed a team to help him transform his idea into a real product.

Within three months Rocket Insights had designed and built the initial Kaymbu product: a native iPad app that makes it easy for teachers to take pictures in the classroom and securely share them with parents during the school day. We also built a backend web application to process the images and send notification emails to parents. This MVP (Minimum Viable Product) allowed us to continually test our hypothesis: “Can teachers and parents adopt Kaymbu in their classrooms and use it successfully?” Initial testing showed that the answer was “yes”.

After the initial launch proved successful, we worked with Kaymbu to build out a robust feature set that made the product viable for sale. We helped turn the feedback Kin was getting from teachers into new features. During this second three month phase we helped Kaymbu grow into a full-featured application running in over one hundred paying classrooms and learning environments. Because of this initial success Kaymbu was accepted into the competitive Imagine k12 accelerator program and became a NewSchools Seed Fund company.

It was astounding to see how quickly Rocket Insights grasped the essence of what we were trying to do and produced a beautiful working prototype that I was proud to use in my daughter's pre-school. Over the next six months Rocket Insights truly felt like a partner that cared about the success of my company as they helped us prioritize, design and build the many features we needed to make this a successful company. Any startup would be lucky to get their help in launching their company.

Kin Lo, CEO

Product Highlights:

1. Smart Capturing & Sharing

The day of a pre-school teacher is hectic and fast-paced. To design an app that teachers will actually use during their whirlwind days, we prioritized simplicity and time management. It had to be simple for teachers to take a photo, identify and tag the correct students in the photo, and write a quick caption before sharing it with parents. Then we found out it wasn’t always possible for teachers to do these tasks at the same time. Our design solution allowed teachers to take photos at any time during the day and then come back later to finish off their editing steps. This share-when-you-can workflow resonated with teachers and was instrumental in the early success of Kaymbu.

Kaybmu capture screen
Kaybmu add caption
Kaybmu teacher organize

A simple and seamless capture screen: a teacher taps a single button to capture a moment during the school day.

Later, a teacher views the photo and easily adds a caption or tags and with a single tap effortlessly identifies students in the photo.

The iPad app also lets teachers organize photos into groups and share them in a single tap.

2. Powerful Management Tools

While the iPad app was highly-focused on taking and sharing photos, our research started to show that teachers and administrators needed tools to manage this new content. To enable this we designed and built a web app allowing administrators to manage classrooms, search and download old photos, style their email template, and even generate documentation for accreditation and parent/teacher conferences. These requirements emerged from usage of the initial product so would have been hard to predict.

Kaybmu management screen
Kaybmu search screen
Kaybmu email template
Kaybmu accreditation features

An easy-to-use management screen allows admins to create and organize teacher accounts and learning centers.

A powerful search screen lets admins find photos and content across their entire organization.

A simple email template screen allows admins to edit templates and send test emails (not often found in an iPad app)

We even designed functionality to allow admins to annotate photos and export PDFs for accreditation purposes.

3. Parent Communication

The most important interaction in the Kaymbu app is the communication between teachers and parents. It was essential that this be frictionless and flexible enough to accommodate different modes of messaging so we designed it so that teachers can send moments to parents by both email and SMS. Throughout a given week parents would receive notifications when teachers shared single photos and at the end of the week a digest email was sent out to all parents containing every moment pertaining to their child. This methodology was overwhelmingly successful...with emails regularly reaching a 300% open rate. (Yes most parents opened these emails multiple times) This success was possible because we worked so closely with Kin to innovate based on user research.

Services Provided:

Technology Used

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Kaymbu was named by Fast Company as one of the Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Education.