User Observation and Analysis

Problem Statement

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

(Names used are placeholder names and do not represent the name of the interviewee or related parties.)

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.

Because of her busy lifestyle, she has difficulty having time to meet other parents in these respective activities. She knows that there is a regular group of children near her home who go to the same activities, but she has difficulty reaching out to them with the idea of carpooling. When she does find, groups she wants to split the time evenly between the group to allow her to save as much time as possible to focus on her job. She also mentioned that carpooling groups she has been a part of change frequently as children are not always able to attend certain things because of family funtions or the like. After noticing this, she states that having a set schedule of drivers on a rotation while having the flexibility to make changes along with a fair and balanced system for sharing the driving load. This is important to her because saving money as a single mother was very important to her. Jane's other primary concern was safety because she is not able to be there at all times while her children are being transported. She likes to know where her kids are at all times and would like to have the ability to contact the driver at all times.

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. 

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.

Lin

Lin is a 48-year-old mother with 2 kids, Alice and Bob. She lives in a middle-class suburban neighborhood, and her home is located 4.4 miles away from the local middle and high school, which is about a 15 minute drive. She is married. Both parents emigrated from China, work 9 to 5 engineering jobs, and use computers every day at work.

Alice is 14 years old and plays the clarinet. Alice attends marching band practice 3 times a week from 3-5 PM. As a working parent, Lin sometimes has group meetings that although scheduled in advance, nonetheless force her to stay late at work. As a result, Lin sometimes picks up Alice late, which frustrates the band director, who is eager to go home. Lin did not speak to other parents about sharing rides because she was less inclined to take initiative due to her functional, but not fluent English skills. Alice was not socially active either.

Bob is 12 years old and plays the violin. He participates in the city youth orchestra which meets every Saturday afternoon; the location is 45 minutes away from home. Because Lin was proactive in finding carpooling opportunities, she was able to join a group of 3 parents that had already formed a carpool. The furthest house was located 15 minutes away. This carpool was easier to set up because the orchestra primarily consisted of Chinese-American children, and Lin is fluent and socially confident in Chinese. The kids are not friends with each other; in fact, one is completely detached from the others. This does not matter to Lin; the main concern is that the parents are trustworthy.

As a working mother, Lin has a busy schedule and seeks carpooling opportunities to ease the time commitment of chauffeuring her 2 kids with active extracurriculars. Lin is most concerned with finding other parents to carpool with, optimizing for distance, being reminded of dates, and being able to switch with other parents in case a conflict comes up.

User Analysis

Major Characteristics

• Can communicate in English
• Are 25 to 55 years old
• Have school-aged children (5 to 18 years old)
• Live in suburban areas that require driving
• Possess at least functional computer skills, but not necessarily anything too complex
• Own cars that hold 4+ people
• Own phones

User Classes

1. Parents Reaching Out to Others

• Non-native English speakers who are not socially confident
• Have children who are not social, i.e. do not meet many other children

2. Time Saving Parents

• Lead busy lifestyles that do not leave extra time to organize carpools
• Desire stress alleviation from managing many different schedules
• Need a fair distribution of driving time to maximize their time not carpooling

3. Money Saving Parents

• Need a fair distribution of driving amount to maximize their savings from carpooling
• If others are willing to drive more often, they would prefer that they do

Needs & Goals

Carpoolers in General

• Want to save on gas money and time
• Need help finding new people to carpool with and starting the initial conversation
• Prefer to carpool with people who live nearby
• Need help with directions
• Would like to be reminded of when they are responsible for driving
• Want driving responsibilities to be split fairly

Carpooling Parents Specifically

• Prefer a simple interface that is easy and intuitive to use
• Are concerned with the safety of their children
• Need flexibility and ease of communication in case scheduling conflicts arise
• Are interested in the possibility of socializing with other parents