Ontario Playground Finder

Inside the app

Browsing, filtering and contributing — the three things a family actually does.

Map view with filters for playgrounds, splash pads and trails alongside recommended parks — Find a Park

Filter by age group, accessibility and amenities, with results on a live map.

Park detail page showing amenities, accessibility rating and parent reviews — Park Detail

Amenities, accessibility and parent reviews for a single park.

Multi-step form for submitting a new playground to the platform — Add a Park

A guided submission flow so the community can grow the map.

The Problem

Google Maps doesn't verify playground listings. There's no age-appropriateness data, no detail on equipment or facilities, and no way to tell a maintained site from a neglected one. Families fall back on asking parenting groups which playground suits a two-year-old — a question that gets answered from memory, one neighbourhood at a time.

The Solution

A dedicated community platform for playgrounds. Every record is collected through a structured field survey, so equipment type, target age group, condition, surface material and amenities are captured consistently — and published somewhere anyone can search before they leave the house.

ArcGIS dashboard showing equipment types by age group, equipment conditions, surface materials and a map of surveyed Ontario parks — The live dashboard — Click to explore it.

Role: Lead product designer and data engineer
Team: Solo
Timeline: 2025 — ongoing
Organization: Personal / civic project

Background & Impact

Background

As the Lead Product Designer and Data Engineer, I bridged the gap between complex GIS datasets and human-centric UI — deciding what a parent actually needs to know, then designing a survey volunteers could fill in consistently.

The project started inside the Esri stack: ArcGIS Survey123 for field collection and an ArcGIS dashboard for public exploration. That validated the idea quickly, but the data model outgrew what the platform could express — so I moved the pipeline to fully Python, cleaning, reshaping and publishing the dataset myself.

Impact

Equipment Surveys: 49 Equipment Surveys
Verified Parks: 10 Verified Parks

Technical Foundation

ArcGIS Survey123

Structured field collection for community contributors.
ArcGIS Dashboards

The public map and breakdowns by age, condition and surface.
Python

Cleaning and reshaping survey responses into the published dataset.
SQLite

Local spatial storage — bounding-box filtering is all the product needs.
Figma

Interface design for the browse, detail and submission flows.

Add a playground to the map