It's All About the Kids Foundation
Check-in System
OVERVIEW
It's All About the Kids Foundation bridges the weekend food insecurity gap for children that live in impoverished neighborhoods in San Diego.
ROLE
UX Designer
User Research, Interaction, Visual design, Prototyping & Testing
GOAL
The program was experiencing a slowdown when families arrived to check-in. The objective was to come up a solution to lower the amount time spent by families starting from arriving to receiving their food supplies.
How can we create a easy-to-use tool that can speed up the check-in process?
It's All About the Kids Foundation is an non-profit organization in San Diego focus in providing nutritious food for children in impoverished neighborhoods. There are over 200 families registered for the food pantry service. Volunteers come in each week to sign families in and distribute food to them. The organization encountered a bottleneck situation during check-in each week and they did not have a reliable way in collecting and editing information for the registered families.
I was the only designer on the team.
I was working along with three engineers on the team. I was responsible for the following.
- Conducted user research with the existing user base and gather insight.
- Created wireframes, established the user experience and visual design of the product.
- Tested the solution with the user base and iterated the product if necessary.
Background
Understanding the Problem
Our team volunteered with It's All About the Kids Foundation and experienced the system first hand. We documented our experience as a first time volunteer.
I then conducted research interviews with our primary users (volunteers, the families, and the founder) to uncover any additional pain points that they were experiencing.
My research revolved around the following.
- Understanding the user goals and needs
- Uncovering pain points with the existing user journey
- Determining the success of the tasks measured
I documented and captured the current check-in process into a flowchart.
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We have identified the following pain points.
Gathering Insights
After collecting the recordings from the user interviews,
After collecting the recordings from the user interviews, I created the following user stories to focus on prioritizing customers' needs.
- As a family member coming to It's All About the Kids Foundation, I want to spend less time in queue so that I can spend more time with my family or hurry back to work.
- As a It's All About the Kids Foundation volunteer, I want to be able to easily access the names on the check-in list, so that I can focus more on the conversation with the families that are coming in.
- As the founder of It's All About the Kids Foundation, I want to be able to visualize the data of families coming in and food given out, so that I can better prepare what food to prepare and how many volunteers to staff.
We thought we had an ideal solution.
Based on the above problems identified, I worked towards addressing these pains by coming up with potential solutions. We first decide to test out a QR code system.
- Scanning QR can be very fast and reduce interactions between families and volunteers. Help decrease the slowdown due to the language barrier and human error pain point.
- Volunteers can use their own device and create multiple stations for check-in rather than relying on physical data sheet.
- After scanning the QR code, the data recorded can be captured on a Excel sheet automatically instead of manual entering data each time.
I implemented the QR code system on my next visit by handing out name cards with QR code attached for families coming in and performed a usability study by observing the families and volunteers behavior. I was able to discover additional pain points with the QR code system.
- Users suddenly have more responsibilities. Families are now expected to have to bring in their QR code each time they visit.
- What is QR Code? Some families are not familiar with how QR code work, volunteers now would have to be tasked to provide additional help to the family. And volunteers might have to teach in another language.
- Forgetting QR code brings you back to manual sign in. Families who forgot their QR code would have to go through the manual system once again, leads to slow down.
- QR Code loses the charm. Volunteers miss the interactive aspect with the families by having the opportunity to get to know the families coming in when they exchange information.
- Well, the team now also have to make a bunch of QR code.
I discussed my finding with the team and decide to pivot from the idea of the QR code, but we wanted to include the benefits of a digital system, such as the ease of portability, faster processes and input data automatically into our next solution.
Wireframing the solution
Based on the above problems identified, I worked towards addressing these pain points by coming up with potential solutions:
- Establishing a digital check-in system to assist volunteers on their task of searching for a name.
- Combining the workflow of signing up new families and checking in returning families into one workflow.
- Introducing other methods to identify families coming in if reciting their names are too difficult for volunteers.
- Digital check-in makes creating separate check-in station easier as well as enabling the ability for automatic data entry.
I quickly mocked up some basic wireframes to gather feedback from Engineers and the users on the overall layout and structure of the check-in form.
Validating the designs
I conducted usability testing sessions with Volunteers and the Founder to see if this design would solve their problem. I gave out a task of checking in a family coming in and monitor how they would interact with the interface.
A second usability testing sessions were conducted to measure how much faster checking in using a digital data base would take. Before building our own database, we utilized Excel sheet of all the existing families in the system to quickly measure how much time is saved.
Reflection and takeaways
We initially planned to implement an QR code check-in system due to the nature of efficiency and might eliminate the slow down once families became familiar in the system and eliminates the need of communication. However, we soon realize that many families are not familiar with what a QR code is which might discourage them from using the food pantry service.
Some key takeaways from this project are:
- Communicate clearly with your client to find the user need.
- Design for your users and not what the best solution for you is.
- Spending time checking-in as a volunteer is valuable and it's easier to capture what actually slows down the process and understanding what the pain points are for the users.