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Problems: Must be updated frequently to be useful. This isn't an optimal solution to the scheduling problem and still has no way to leverage certain private information. This does facilitate joint-babysitting scheduling. This also allows better coordination of flexible schedules.
Casey McNamara
Design 1: Timelines and invitations
Parents can view all (or a subset of) their babysitter contacts' schedules as compact timelines one above the other, helping them find an ideal time to schedule a sitter. They invite babysitters one at a time; sitters can accept or reject invitations. For this system to work, sitters must have told the interface their schedules in advance.
Design 2: Small-screen with invitations
Under size constraints it makes more sense to have parents propose a time and the app check to see which babysitters are free, rather than trying to display everyone's schedules and let the parents optimize. The parents are presented with a choice of babysitters free during their proposed time (and can go back and choose a different time if they dislike this list) and can invite one of them; sitters can accept or reject invitations. Again, sitters must have told the interface their schedules in advance.
Design 3: Calendar with postings
Having met with the group, I think Liz's Design 1 is strictly better than this one. In any case, it's a Google Calendar-style interface where parents can see (any subset of) their babysitters contacts' schedules on the calendar, create an event for a time they wish to find a babysitter, and post that event to whatever subset of their babysitter contacts they wish; babysitters see postings that have been shared with them and can claim jobs they are interested in. With this interface, it's okay if the sitters' real schedules differ from those known to the system, as long as parents share postings liberally.
Storyboards
Design 1: This design will have three main sections organized by tabs: Home, Profile and Jobs. The Home tab will show notifications that the user receives. The profile tab will store useful information about both types of users, and also allow babysitters to store their availability. The Jobs tab will allow parents to create new jobs and allow babysitters to manage the jobs they have been invited to. The major feature of this design is a calendar interface that allows users to quickly display their scheduling preferences by painting over times which work for them.
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Problems: Tends to favor babysitters posting schedules and parents planning immediately, thus not helping babysitters coordinate jobs to maximize the number of people they can babysit for, although if parents post events and are willing to wait, it can facilitate this type of planning as well as joint-babysitting. Although it makes schedules in a single day very easy to compare, checking multiple day availability is harder and requires the user to remember what was best on past days.
Design 3: Calendar
In order to find a babysitter for her children while she goes on a date with her husband, Lia opens up SitterPlan and looks at the weekly calendar of babysitters' availability. She checks off the boxes to show her top two sitters' calendars - Jennifer and Wanda.
Lia decides to go on her date on Friday, from 7 to 11. Jennifer's not free during that block, but Wanda is. She clicks the part of the calendar representing Friday at 7, which pulls up a (movable, closable) popup to create an event. Lia chooses to share the event with all her babysitter contacts - if Wanda ends up having something come up, it would be better if the others have had time to think about whether they can be free - and
clicks POST.
Wanda sees the job posting the next time she opens SitterPlan to check up on her part-time babysitting business. (Probably she's configured SitterPlan to send her emails when someone posts a job. Like Facebook, but less annoying.) She sees on the calendar that Lia has posted a job on Friday, when she's free. Another family has also posted a job on Friday, but Wanda prefers babysitting for Lia.
Wanda clicks on Lia's job to pull up a popup that lets her apply for it. She enters the amount of money she'd like to get paid for the job and clicks APPLY.
Lia gets an email with that information. She can reply to Wanda immediately to set up details, or wait a few days to see if anyone else replies before choosing someone.
Analysis
Design 1: This design is very efficient because painting over all times which work can be done very quickly. It might be a bit confusing to learn without text explaining what to do for at least the first time. It is somewhat safe since there is an easy method for undo-ing mistakes, but mistakes will be very common because any time a user accidentally drags across a time with the mouse down it will get colored.
Design 2: This This design allows efficient input and very easy schedule comparison on single days. Since timelines are thin, we can stack many of them on top of each other and visually looking for overlap is relatively easy. We can also prioritize the list based on availability, favorite babysitter, or other criteria. This does not handle multi-day scheduling well. Creating multiple blocks of time may not be the most intuitive in this interface. We also believe this design will tend to drive babysitters putting up their schedules and parents using it to find a match. This achieves the parents goal very well, but does not allow babysitters to coordinate with multiple parents over flexible schedules.
Design 3: This design is fairly efficient, although clicking the calendar and then entering the precise times of the job is one more step than ideal. My storyboard didn't go into the babysitters' schedule-entry process; for added efficiency, that can be Design-1-style painting, since the parents have no need to know specifically what things the babysitters are doing, just that they are busy; and sitters' schedules can by-default carry over from week to week. Learnability is good due to the external consistency with Google Calendar (there are some deviations, like collapsing multiple babysitters being free into a single rectangle rather than side-by-side rectangles, but the overall interface is fairly similar). Advanced features like making events that are flexible as to what times they're at are less easy to learn and in some cases (like multi-day scheduling) not clearly supported. As with Design 2, this design will tend to drive babysitters putting up their schedules and parents creating an event with a particular babysitter in mind.