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Parents of school-aged children have to shuttle their children to school and activities. Carpooling would reduce the burden, but parents often face difficulty in creating carpooling arrangements due to not knowing who would be a suitable partner and social awkwardness. Even once a carpooling arrangement is made, parents have difficulty keeping track of when their turns are, the various destinations, and ensuring an equitable split of the driving. Parents desire an easy, economically effective, and safe solution to ameliorate the amount of time spent driving their children to their activities.
Observation & Interviews
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(names used are placeholder names and do not represent the name of the interviewee)
1. Jane
Jane is a single mother who is twenty five years old. She has two children who are ages 7 and 5 respectively. Jane is not very proficient with computers; she states she is able to maintain her Facebook account, but struggles to use applications as advanced as Microsoft Office. Her children are starting to become very active in activities such as karate, school, soccer, and piano lessons. She works at a full-time job and struggles to have time to get her children to the activities they enjoy while providing for them as well.
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The most interesting comments she made about her goals while carpooling was that it is very difficult to keep track of which children are going where and when they are going. Managing her, her children's, and other children's schedules has been a daunting task for her and stated that this is a problem that is very much worth addressing.
2. Roxanne
Roxanne* is an upper middle class stay-at-home Mom with three kids ages 12-17. All of her children are extremely active with various after school activities: Josh* and Kayla* are in highschool, and Jackie* is in middle school. At this time, Kayla is able to drive her brother Josh to and from highschool; Roxanne drives Jackie to and from middle school every day. She thinks it's important to have her children supplement their education with extra curricular activities and pushes them to try new things. Unfortunately, that requires the majority of Roxanne's day to be spent driving, even though Kayla is now able to drive herself. Her husband works full time and over time every day and has little to no interaction with the kids and can definitely not assist in driving.
Although Roxanne did not like having to drive all the time, she infrequently utilized carpooling. She felt uncomfortable discussing carpooling with parents she did not know for two main reasons: she was shy and she was concerned about the safety of her kids. The kids did carpool when they had a close friend in their extra-curricular activities. However, this was not always convenient since the friends did not necessarily live nearby.
User Classes
1. Parents Reaching Out to Others
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