The Play District is THE free resource for parents & their kids to explore their hometown's amusement, parks, restaurants & services and travel to other US cities with less anxiety, stress and unwelcome surprises. "Spend less time planning and more time playing!" is what we like to say. Locals know best, so each district is run by residents in the area so you can Play Like a Local and never miss out on those hidden gems.

With a heavy focus on our users' experiences, I design solutions based on data analysis, testing, user & client feedback to improve our web product, The Play District, for all our use cases and affiliates. I realize the importance of working, designing and building a product in such a way that the user experience is not compromised, while accounting for investment and ROI, bandwidth and timeline, market demands and profitability.

Our dynamic filtering is one of many features which sets our platform apart from any "travel guide" or "mom blog" or your average city tourism page. Through deep UX research via focus groups and individual user and market interviews I learned the core problems facing parents and caretakers of children. I was lucky enough to travel to Phoenix, Arizona and meet a group of over 200+ parents and mothers as TPD expands to include Phoenix as a district. I learned the neurodivergent mothers' community was the most vocal. They voiced the need for easy, transparent resources which can aid in preventing their child with autism, down syndrome, or other mental or physical impairments from going through overwhelming experiences, or where their conditions would be accepted, and not judged for their child's coping behaviors.

I listened to our users intently, using neutral language to reduce bias, to truly grasp the core problem: the lack of a centralized source of sensible, specific parental resources, guides and tools for families who do not fall into the typical image of Mom, Dad, son and daughter american family. Thus, I created the "Sensory Friendly" filter by using data from the businesses themselves and user feedback both via questionnaires to determine which restaurants, amusement parks, classes, services and other resources/activities in Tucson have safe spaces/specific spaces for neurodivergent children, such as We Rock The Spectrum (which is specifically made to be a space accepting of all conditions, providing appropriate space, equipment and safety). I also added the "Kids Favorite Bites" filter, indicating which establishment, regardless of category, served "kid safe" food - the typical meals children oftentimes latch on to, and refuse anything else such as: chicken nuggets & fries, pizza, mac and cheese and hamburgers. Likewise, our "Kids Eat Free" filter will display establishments which participate in some kind of free meal/dessert for children to encourage adventures and memories without the pressure of finance.

By adding these filters, along with the Halal, Kosher, Dairy-Free, Gluten-Free, and more, I expanded our users, not just by including these "edge cases," not by only accounting for our specific market (parents), but combining these two to create a solution for everyday adults who have trouble finding these very strict religious/medical diets or are neurodivergent themselves and would be aided by our data-based and user feedback oriented filters. V2 of the platform is set to launch August of 2023 via Webflow.