In the UK, families waiting for a developmental assessment wait months. Dododo offered a different route: take a screening now, get a personalised activity plan for your child, and ask a specialist questions along the way. Children aged 2–8, mainly autism and ADHD.
We had tested physical activity boxes earlier. They were the obvious product, and we set them aside to build the digital one.

What parents asked for, and what they actually needed
Every parent told us the same thing: I don't know what to do. So we built exactly that — screening, a tailored plan, expert access.
The problem didn't go away.
Parents now knew what to do, but knowing was not enough to make the activities happen. The harder part was starting: fitting activities into an already full day, judging whether this was a good moment, and feeling confident that they were responding to their child appropriately.
The thresholds we set before we started
Before the pilot, we set two minimum signals that would give us confidence to continue with the same proposition: engagement and value. Three families completing the six weeks would meet the engagement signal; two choosing to pay at the real paywall would meet the value signal.
Three of the twenty supported families completed the six weeks, so engagement met the bar. Nobody chose to pay, so the value signal did not. The interviews remained warm and positive, but the behavioral evidence told us not to keep investing in the fixed-plan proposition.
Where the engagement actually was
Not in the exercises. In the parent module — short pieces on how to begin, how to build activities into an ordinary day, and how to read whether your child is ready for something new right now. That last piece, which parents came to call the traffic light, was the one they returned to.
So we rebuilt around the parent rather than the plan: confidence, timing and support, instead of more content.
“The most important thing for me was the parent module. I realised how much I needed to look after my own energy. The traffic-light approach helped too.”— pilot parent

For the MVP we deliberately kept the interface minimal, focusing on the core loop: assessment → plan → activities. We chose a web app over a native app for flexibility and speed of iteration — critical for a two-person product team learning from real families in real time.

Our research covered the UK, Europe, the US, and Latin America — and revealed real differences in how families approach developmental concerns and how much support systems offer them. Designing for this audience means designing for someone under stress: the tone, the pacing, and how results are communicated matter as much as the features.

Knowing what to do was not the same as being able to do it. In Dododo, the missing part was not more content, but confidence, timing and support at the moment of action.