The Coo App

Monday 19 September 2016

We met the client today. Amit Rai and Shilpa, both graduates from Harvard Business School. They have 30 years + experience in companies such as Microsoft, McKinsey, Nokia, Linklaters and other start ups.

So in short, Amit and Shilpa have developed an app, which is in its MVP stage, that will help tighten communications between parents and schools. To have a centralised database where the user can access all the information which is relayed to teachers by parents, vice-versa, parents to parents, or entire institutions to parents. Not only that, it features an integrated calendar in which Groups can jot down events, invite users and have them see, edit and comment on upcoming events for their children at school.

The app is in a very native stage, however, he wants our team to develop the desktop website, or web-app.

In our meeting, Amit emphasised that he wanted to connect and organise parents. Moreover, commented on how he would like to create a web platform where raising a child and putting them through school can be simple and fun. Where it can be easy.

However, he has had many issues when pushing out the app to his children’s school. One is that many parents are are old school when it comes to planning and organising their daily activities. This relates to my own aunt as well. These parents have been using a antiquated yet secure and physical way of planning. They keep a diary and/or physical calendar when they can annotate all their children’s school related info. They have this as a physical material that they can touch, write on, erase and easily access.

Another issue is how some parents have IOS systems or Android systems. Not to mention Blackberry or the Windows phones which make the platform harder to access. In fact, some parents do not have any smart phones at all.

The one and probably most important issue is how administrating groups or doing large inputs to the application through a phone, can be a tiring and tedious process, which is why Whatsapp and Slack can be great as you can access through a desktop and input large amounts of data. Moreover, institutions such as nurseries and schools prefer desktop-based applications where they can easily administrate and relay information to parents.

So based on the issues he has been having, he has encountered the need to get UX/UI done on his site.

I have mentioned Whatsapp and Slack before. Amit uses (to a great extent) Whatsapp to communicate with other people or groups. A great benefit of Whatsapp, as well as Slack, is the ability to have it on your desktop. Amit told us that when he’s at work he is always using Whatsapp web, which enables him to input large amounts of text in an easier way, without having to waste time by going through your phone and having to input through there. Slack however, he finds it a great tool for sharing stuff, but feels that its much more complex than Whatsapp and therefore only uses its chat functionality with work members.

For planning and scheduling, he uses Trello for its simplicity. This gives us a great starting point when it comes to information architecture, heuristics and general interface design.

During our talk Amit gave us examples of how great websites such as Facebook, which started as a website, don’t feel so great anymore when they’re translated into a phone. Instead, apps such as Slack or Whatsapp (did slack start as a phone-based app? — not sure about this) which started as phone-based apps, translate in a fantastic manner to desktop, as they have room to grow. However, sites when translated onto phone-based apps, need all of their info to be crammed in.

How true and how often this happens I do not yet know, but will be good to know if its general consensus.

USER INTERVIEWS

User interviews played a crucial part within our initial investigation. Not only did they help

determine the pain points, shape the personas and understand a parent’s journey throughout their kid’s school, it (most importantly) helped us place ourselves in the shoes of parents. This, according to our client, was one of the most important elements when coming to understand the concept of the art; he had worked with designers/developers who could not simply understand the viewpoint coming from the parents.

Half of us went to interview parents and the other half went to interview teachers. For the teacher interviews we went to Waterslide school in Chesham, where one of us went to school in.

Our client, however, was not aware that we would conduct interviews on teachers. We even went as far as hiding it from him on our design studio, as we thought that mentioning it to him might be a bad idea and could make him think that we had lost sight of the actual objective of the project. But this is UX, so we interviewed, of course.

Having being part of the half that went to the school to interview, it was extremely insightful to get the perspective from the school and how the organisation (or disorganisation) works.

This however clearly represents one school and all schools have different organisation and communication methods. For all we know, there could be a school that has managed to centralise all communications and works flawlessly. It is however safe to assume that there’s a lack of resources that helps schools, or parents, for that matter, plan and communicate through a single application. This is evident through all the interviews we did with parents, teachers and surveys we sent out.

So, by doing interviews we were able to establish pain points such as:

• “Would be great to have feedback; what they liked, what they didn’t. I don’t get a lot of feedback…”
• “I would love a central thing where it all merged. Magical-central-diary-resource-thing.”
• “The end of day playground isn’t the best situation to have “awkward” conversations. Like when a child wet their pants.”

From the dozen interviews we got at the school, it was clear that institutions such as Waterside school are in dire need of a centralised communication and planning app.

The other half of our members who carried out interviews with parents also got crucial pain points. Parents, who probably suffer the most out of disorganised communications and decentralised planning, normally shift to a state of apathy towards their kid’s schools and find themselves trailing behind whilst trying to plan out their lives in physical calendars.

Having collated all of the interviews from parents and teachers alike, we proceeded to have a design studio.

Design Studio

We met with Amit and his developer for a design studio where we all got to visualise the desktop version of the Coo app together. We gave ourselves time slots of 10 minutes where we sketched on paper how each of us imagined it. We did this twice before all of us worked on one single sketch collectively.

This proved to be extremely useful as we could see the limitations he had in mind and how he envisaged his baby (his app) to take shape physically (should I say virtually?) on desktop. In fact, to experiment, I even tried to add deeper levels to his app, which represented power users such as school administrations or even teachers. When explaining the layout, we got a straight refusal from his side. Having done teacher interviews and knowing how much his business could benefit from including the institution side, his reaction was extremely interesting.

From there we defined the design principles for the app:

1) Fun but not childish

2) Collaborative and supportive

3) reliable

4) Simple and clear

5) ageless and unisex

6) Efficient but not clinical

7) The user is always in control

Having agreed on the principles, we continued with the initial sketchings for the prototype.

Wireframing and Prototypes

Once we started doing the wireframes, the idea became clearer. We started developing a chat which made sense to us. Unfortunately, or fortunately, the chat was looking very similar to the interface that other applications have. Most notably, Whatsapp.

When we had drawn out all the screens on a whiteboard where we could easily add or remove functions and quickly sketch functionalities, we brought in people to review the screen flows with us to see if it made sense to them.

Version A, version B

From the initial wireframe sketchings, we proceeded to digital wireframes. We ended up creating two versions of the wireframes as we weren’t sure ourselves how to proceed. So we tested both.

Version A

Version A’s layout contains a chat interface which resembles to other competitors. This was a way of playing with what’s out there, and creating a recognisable experience for the user where he or she can easily navigate.

The user was then intended to toggle between chat and calendar using the icons featured at the top navigation. To then create a new group chat, the icon also lays on the top navigation, on the right.

Version B

Version B features its navigation running down on the left hand side, which aims to show the 3 key objectives of the application: events, invitations and chats.

We thought it important to separate events (calendars) and invitations as the action of getting invitations and accepting them should be highlighted, and should act as stand alone as parents will be actively receiving these and therefore they become a key interaction within the app.

When testing both versions, users found it overwhelmingly easier to navigate through prototype B. We can easily deduct that by having words instead of icons (obviously) the navigation is instinctively more direct and the site is therefore easier to explore from end to end. So we quickly moved on to develop prototype B, re-test it and we then pulled out the digital Prototype.