Project Spotlight #8: Project READ Literacy Network
A web application that streamlines outreach and operational processes for family literacy programs.
Co-authored by Monica Xu, Brittany Lau and Blueprint’s W21 Project READ team!
Project READ & Get Set Learn 📚
Project READ Literacy Network is an umbrella organization that coordinates and runs literacy programs based in the Waterloo-Wellington area. The organization was founded in 1988, and works with the public and their network members to build literacy and essential skills such as reading text, using documents, oral communication, and much more.
Get Set Learn (GSL) is one of Project READ’s programs. The GSL team focuses on providing literacy training for families with young children, which includes family playtime, circle time, crafts, and opportunities for families to interact. GSL runs several sessions of their program each year, where each session consists of twice-weekly classes for eight weeks, all free of charge.
Problem Space 💭
GSL is constantly evolving and adapting to the literacy needs of their clients, and in turn, so has the data the team keeps. A few of their key user tasks include:
- Working with families through a multi-step registration process
- Recording families’ attendance and class completion
- Assigning responsibilities to members of the GSL staff
- Querying historical data
- Aggregating data for reporting & metrics tracking
GSL’s outreach and operations processes rely on a complex ecosystem of Google Forms and Sheets. The lack of structure that comes from shared drives and free-form documents resulted in the following:
- An un-intuitive user experience navigating through file directories
- Inconsistent data formatting across documents
- Inability to efficiently search for data across multiple documents
This wound up adding friction to a few of GSL’s key workflows, making their tasks manual and time-consuming. There HAD to be a better way!
Solution: The GSL Hub 💡
We’re building the GSL Hub, an internal tool that allows GSL staff to record and aggregate client data & interactions across classes & sessions. Our tool aims to fulfil the following success criteria:
- Make data easy to consolidate for reporting & metrics tracking
- Promote data integrity while allowing flexibility to navigate through organizational changes
- Save users’ time and energy by automating repetitive workflows
- Integrate seamlessly with current workflows and other Project READ initiatives
- Make the lives of the GSL staff easier! 😁
Building out the GSL Hub is comprised of two main parts:
Part 1: Migrating client data from Google Sheets to PostgresDB
Currently, years of client data are stored across Google Sheets files. As GSL scales and works with more clients, the lean, DIY nature of spreadsheets makes it increasingly difficult to work with client data. Our team is working with GSL to migrate data from Sheets to PostgresDB.
This change improves consistency, durability, and security of data, and ultimately enable more useful, powerful, and faster querying abilities in the GSL Hub.
Part 2: Implementing components to view and manipulate client data
The various components of the GSL Hub include:
- The Main Registration Table serves as the single source of truth, and displays client data across all sessions.
- The Session View displays data about families registered for a given session, enabling staff to track where a given family is in the registration pipeline, tentatively allocate families to classes, and take attendance.
- The Attendance View for each class lets facilitators take attendance of registered students.
- The Family Details Sidebar displays consolidated data about a family, and can be viewed by clicking a row in the Main Registration Table or the Session View.
- The Registration Form is used to register families for GSL, creating entries in the Main Registration table and corresponding Session View
- The Registration Form Creator lets admins Client Registration Forms for a given session, as required data changes over time
Designs 🎨
Our intention building out an internal tool is to put the user first. As such, in the project scoping phase, a lot of time and thought was put into thinking about the questions:
- Who are the stakeholders involved?
- Who are our primary users?
- What are our users’ needs?
- How should we prioritize user needs?
- What are the user journeys involved?
The following diagram outlines our brainstorming process in identifying the key use cases, opportunities, and paint points of our primary users — GSL staff and facilitators.
Over the course of work sessions, project scoping meetings, user interviews, and feedback meetings, our designs for the GSL Hub have gone through several iterations. Check out some of our latest mocks below!
Meet the Winter 2021 team 👋
Why did you join this team?
- Tayef: I grew up benefiting from literacy programs at my elementary school and public library. Being a developer on Project READ is one way I’m giving back to initiatives aimed at providing literacy education to families in need.
- Emily: Ever since I was young, I always loved reading, and I understand what it’s like to learn another language. I wanted to join Project READ as a designer to give back and help the organization to empower families with a literacy education.
- Brittany: I’m passionate about addressing socio-economic barriers that low-literacy populations face, and was really excited about Project READ’s goals and community impact. It’s been inspiring to learn about how GSL has adapted over the years to continually create long-lasting value for the community.
What excites you about this project?
- Jolene: I’m a strong believer in ensuring that literacy education is accessible to all, and Project READ is an incredible non-profit that does just that! As a developer, it is really exciting knowing that my efforts are helping drive that mission.
- Daniel: In the span of four months, our team went from ground zero to a functioning backend. It’s always exciting to see how far our team has come in such a short period of time, and I’m looking forward to fleshing out the project.
- Erin: I’m really proud of the progress our team has made these past 4 months, from exploring a new problem space all the way to the current implementation. I’m excited that we’re able to help so many people in the Project READ literacy program through the platform we’re building.
What is one cool thing you learned from working on this project?
- Monica: This is my first time managing products in a nonprofit space! I’ve been having a lot of fun learning about how nonprofits operate, as well as how to design and build custom internal tools.
- Prannoy: This was my first time ever working on a large scale project from scratch. Meeting with clients, being a part of the initial technical scoping and creating database diagrams were all new to me, and it was so rewarding to be a part of that creative process!
What’s next 🔍
Our project has a two-term (8 month) timeline. Here are our goals as we wrapped up the Winter 2021 term and head into Spring! 🌱
Winter 2021: wrapping up scoping, working through core functionality
- Design: wrapping up first iteration of mocks for the main web pages and components of the GSL Hub
- Development: backend API design & building out the registration table and family detail views
Spring 2021: continuing development, testing, and working toward an August launch date
- Design: Conducting user testing, iterating on feedback, adapting design to dev implementation requirements
- Development: building the attendance tracker, registration forms, and admin functionality
Our team is super proud of the work we’ve accomplished this term. These past few months have not only been a cultivation of scoping, engineering, and design work, but also incredible teamwork and friendships!
We are absolutely thrilled to continue building out the GSL Hub and helping the amazing staff members at GSL and Project READ. Stay tuned for our launch in a few months 🚀
