Visual and Simple
This design relies more on pictures and other visuals rather than text. It was designed to afford actions like drag and drop. It is meant to be simple and uncluttered. Rare actions like adding a new daycare account should not clutter the interface.
From the daycare worker perspective the tasks follow the following logic:
- Select action (Eg Post Story)
- Select Child/Children
- Fill in Information
From the parents perspective, the interface is suppose to give an idea of a feed (like Facebook Timeline), where interesting stories about the child are posted. For regular/daily information (Eg. How much the child ate, Did the child sleep well, etc) the parents go to the Daily Info section, which is separate from the feed.
The sketches here are of the desktop version of the interface. The version for mobile devices would be slightly different, but would have the same general look and feel.
Storyboard
Illustration |
Comments and Description |
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This is the starting point for the daycare worker. When a Paul drops off Chuck at daycare, Dan clicks in Check in kids. |
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In this screen, when Chuck arrives Dan drags the picture of Chuck from the Not Present window to the Present window. Dan does this for every child, and when he is done he has a working list of the kids that are at daycare today. In the top right corner we can see that Dan is the user that is logged in. |
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To post the story about Chuck's adventures with fingUpdate daily infoer painting, Dan clicks in Post Story in the initial screen, which takes him to this screen. In this screen we have an list with the images of all of the kids that are at daycare today. Dan selects Chuck and then clicks Post Story. Alternatively Dan could have double clicked Chuck's picture instead of pressing the Post Story button. chuckis the logg| |ed in user. |
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After clicking the Post Story button Dan is taken to this page. He fills up the textbox with the details about the story, and choses to attach a picture. |
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This is the screen that Dan sees every time he wants to update the daily info (Eg: What the kids ate, what was their mood, etc). Dan can selects the individuals that for which he wants to update the daily info, and then clicks in the Update daily info button. |
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After pressing the Update daily info button, Dan sees this screen. At the top, he can see the selected kids (the kids whose daily info is going to be updated). The information is updated by moving the sliders. The sliders are initially set to a default value in the middle. Bellow the sliders there is a minimized comment box in case the daycare worker wants to add any comment (Energy Level: Low Comment: he seems to be sick, had a runny nose all morning). The information about how much the kids ate is also inserted in this page. |
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This is Chuck's feed. Next to Chuck's picture we can see the drop off time. The stories that the daycare worker posts about Chuck throughout the day get added to this feed. |
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This is the daily report where parents can check information like How much did chuck eat? or What kind of mood is he in?. |
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This screen is where the parents can see histograms and other types of graphs displaying information about mood, food consumption, temperament etc, of the child across a number of days. |
Analysis
Learnability
Advantages: The design is simple and relies on visuals, therefore it should be fairly intuitive to use. For instance, the drag and drop way of checking children in resembles many other actions that users perform in computers for instance dragging a file from a folder to another folder. The sliders also very rapidly convey what kind of input the interface is expecting from the user. From the parents side the interface is very simple. There is also no input coming from the parents which makes the interface less complex. Most of the learning has to do with the day care worker, and this design tries to divide the tasks in such way that would not confuse the worker. In addition, as I mentioned before the tasks all share the same logic:
- Select action
- Select Child/Children
- Fill in Information
This provides consistency and helps the daycare worker become familiar with the interface.
Disadvantages: In order to make the interface simple and uncluttered some rare actions like adding a parent account or adding a daycare account, were hidden (these are made available if the daycare worker presses on the cogwheel on the first screen).
Efficiency
Advantages: The uncluttered nature of the interface should facilitate common actions like posting a story. In addition, we are aware that the daycare worker might not have time to report individually on each child. Therefore we made it easy to batch this kind of actions by allowing the user to select several children at the same time. This way if the worker wants for instance to update that every kid had pasta for lunch and ate a good amount, all they have to do is click on the select all button, modify the food section and then click update. The fact that the sliders have defaults also makes this type of task easier and faster.
Disadvantages: If there are more than a certain number of students it might not be the best idea to organize them by picture because the daycare worker might have to scroll a lot in order to find a certain child. In addition, as of now, if the worker realizes that he has made some mistake in selecting the kids there is no easy way of changing that without going back to the beginning of the task.
Safety
Advantages: While the daycare worker is filling in the information for a story post or for a daily report he can always see which kid is selected. This way we make it easier to avoid sending messages to incorrect recipients. In addition because the worker selects the students by pictures it is harder to make a mistake when selecting a kid. One reason is that the worker will not mistake two kids with similar names, the other reason is that if the worker is working with a tablet it will be less error prone to select a picture than just a name.
Disadvantages: If there are a lot of children, and the worker wants to select a subset of the children, he might end up scrolling a lot which might make it easy for him to forget one of the children he wanted to select.