Edith Bowen Carpool Design
Embedded Files
Background:
The Edith Bowen Laboratory School is committed to providing a learning environment that allows and encourages children to explore connections between their learning and the world around them.
Pick-up and drop-off traffic flow are often huge issues at any school and this is especially true for Edith Bowen Laboratory School. In addition, parents often arrange carpools with other parents. Logistically, drop-offs and pick-ups can become very confusing and even frustrating.
Design Challenge:
Create something that parents can use to organize carpool groups and communicate with each other about the drop-off/pickup schedule.
KPI:
Efficiency for school traffic will increase by 20%
Audience:
Edith Bowen School Parents
Responsibilities:
Instructional Design, Action Mapping (Needs Analysis), Plan, Persona, User Flow, Wireframe, Mockups, Prototype Development
Tools Used:
Asana, Adobe XD, Adobe Illustrator, Google Docs, Google Slides, Google Sites
Using Asana
For our project we used Asana to track different tasks that needed to be done. Using Asana was good for the first tasks, but it became apparent once we got further into the design process that email was a more effective tool to communicate with one another.
User Persona
Creating the user persona was a great way to develop empathy for users who may not be similar to me. This particular persona was a man who was a single Dad of 4 boys. In contemplating his frustrations and goals I was able to work with a team to develop solutions that would help this particular individual feel his needs, in relation to carpooling were met.
User Flow for Edith Bowen School
Learning how to use a user flow was very insightful. It felt like a great way to lay out a plan, and not waste time on pages or designs that would be ineffective at solving the overall problem. By using a user flow we were able to make it easier to create our wireframe.
Wireframe
Creating our wireframe provided insight into the overall elements of our design process. All the steps before felt necessary, but this felt like the piece that really had excitement because we were finally getting to the creative process space.
User Interview Experience
For my interview I chose to interview someone who works at UVU. UVU is not USU, but UVU has similar issues with morning traffic and has carpool groups for their morning daycare. As I couldn’t interview a USU parent/ staff member, I felt a UVU staff would be the best alternative.
During the interview, the UVU staff member pointed out that the notifications and carpool features were organized in a proficient way! They noted that these features made it easy to collect feedback from the users. The UVU staff member also noted that on the homepage there was an EBS homepage but this homepage didn’t link to another page so it was confusing for the user to know where they should click. The interviewee also pointed out that information might be needed about how often parents should sign up for carpooling. For example, do they only sign up once a year? Or more frequently? We talked briefly about how the website would stay up in case a child/ parent was sick, or out of town.
Even though this user will not actually be participating in the carpool, I was able to still have valuable feedback about what was good about the site and what was confusing. That being said, I feel it would have been helpful to have a targeted user because they would have been able to tell me if they felt the website accurately solved the issue at hand, or if it complicated the issue.
Prototypes
Final Thoughts/ Evaluation
Key Take-Aways
Your design will change along the way, this is to be expected and encouraged.
You will never have the perfect design, the great part about design is that there are always new things to learn and new challenges to explore.
Your design will not satisfy everyone, for example, maybe you aren't happy with the graphics of the design, but the customer is happy. At the end of the day you have to decide, "did you solve the problem you set out to solve?" If the answer is yes, then you have been successful.
Learning Experience
This project was extremely challenging at times. I learned that the biggest reason I was frustrated was that I couldn't see the whole picture at the beginning.
Moving forward I feel that future design projects will make a little more sense because now I have seen the process the whole way through and know what to expect.
Working with a team provides great insight! I think that in many parts of this assignment some of the reason for my frustration was that when I was given the challenge to design a wireframe, I felt frustrated because I had never done this before. It was great to be reminded that I didn't have to do all the hard problem-solving on my own. I had a great team to help me!
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse