Childcare centre director generate and send statements to parents every week. This project is for reducing their effort and time to complete this task.
Centre director login the system and navigate to Statement screen. The most used setting is already pre-populated into the summary. Simply reads "I want to send statements to (family group) in (date range) and in (what) format." They can either press the "Run now" button to trigger the process or schedule regularly. Through this process, centre director can monitor the sending progress and get notified if there's anything goes wrong. When parents have questions for their statement, director can go to the family screen and search for the family, open up historical statements to answer their questions. Parents get statement via email or mobile app.
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As a prominent childcare management system, our product has been developed for over 12 years. It's powerful but not designed in a user-friendly way. We have some competitors delivered better experience products, so they started to take our market. The business has decided to transfer the powerful desktop software to a web based Saas system.
We have started to build the features which will be used in a day-to-day basis: Dashboard, Family management, Rolls, Settings and Issuing statements. These features saved a lot of time and resources for the customers and also saved us the support time and resources. To design those features, we always try to engage with our customers and involve them into the design process for the best design approach. With continued user testing and iterating, our Saas system has successfully delivered the value for customers and won back the market. Please the following before and after screenshots: I started to work on the re-design project since last September with ThoughtWorks team on site. The legacy product is truly amazing. In the recent 12 years, over 7,000 childcare services across Australia use it everyday to deal with extremely complex childcare management work. The products are intelligent and powerful. Childcare and school care services use it to manage room capacities, fees(childcare subsidy), bookings, attendencies, child(ren) profile, medical conditions, contacts, authorisations, incident report and activities etc. However, the maintenance cost is very expensive for the suite of products, as there are desktop software, cloud based applications and native apps for ios and Android. On the other hand, users are expecting a cloud based one-stop shop can do all the work with better experience, which can be accessed anytime and anywhere. The market has a few competitors with better experience but less functionalities as they are still very new. However, some of our customers moved to them because of the better design. This led us to think about re-design our products... Where do we start and how do we start? For such a complex product, re-design the experience is more than just coping and improving the current version. We have rich data to analyse, we have loyal customers to help with the research, and we have more than decade of experience for this industrial. But, where do we start? 1. We start with a blank paper, and try to forget all the historical information: A product exists because there's a problem needs to be solved. To re-design a product, we should forget current product and start with the problems. Within the childcare world, no two families are the same, and no two children are the same. Without a system, childcare management will be chaotic. For example, a family can book their children in a certain pattern to different rooms in the same childcare service. And different rooms have different rates, plus this family entitles childcare subsidy according to their household annual income. A family pays different fees with another family as their situation are not the same. Some services force parents to use Direct Debit to collect the payment, some services are open the Direct Debit as optional etc. The management software should be automated and simplified to execute the tasks for services and parents, so that they can have more time to focus on children. With this in mind, we write down all the problems and prioritize them. 2. Now we have problems and priorities, the next step is to define the high-level product vision to meet user needs. A high-level product vision gives us a direction. We can plan out the broad features, and put them into different versions. Such as, what is the MVP going to look like? What are following versions going to look like? Of course the product vision will not be the end of decision as we need to adjust it according to user's feedback. However, the product vision can guide the planning work. 3. Define MVP: We can't have all the features built in one go, this will cost too much time and resource. We need to build a product as soon as possible to launch to the market, so that we can collect feedback to improve it. To define MVP, we need user's help to select the most critical and frequent used features, and combine with our resource and tech limitation. This process involves lots of research, workshops and analyzing. 4. User journey mapping and information architecture: User journey and IA impact the user experience directly. Without this, the features are not connecting together, and the experience will be broken. 5. Breakdown the features and elaborate them: The MVP gives us the clear vision of the product and direction. Breakdown the features and elaborate with the whole team can help us to evaluate and estimate the work and manage the risks early. 6. Design and usability test: There are lots of ways to design a product: Co-design with user, run design workshop with the team, designer prototyping etc. No matter which way we decide to apply, we need to test and evaluate the design before it goes to development. There are also many ways to test the design, but for my personal perspective, choose the way whichever works. 7. Story writing: User story writing can help us to create a simplified description of the requirement and accelerate development process. 8. Iteration planning: Release regularly, release often. So user can expect new features to be added in for the product. 9. Development and testing. 10. Release the product and collect feedback. Good product is not static. No matter we're re-designing an existing product or creating a brand new product, we always need to engage with our users to serve their needs and solve their problems.
And that's the only way lead to success. The definition of a good product is to solve a problem in real life for someone. When we plan our product, we should start with following questions:
1. What is the problem we're trying to solve? 2. Who has this problem? 3. If we can solve this problem, what's the value we can bring to them? If there is no problem, then the product fails no matter how well the design is, . So bare this product vision in mind can help us heading to the right direction and achieve the right goal. We create this parent app because we want to solve the problems for parents having with childcare or OSHC services. In the real life, any of childcare management work can be a headache process as it needs to involve lots of physical conversations between services and parents(i.e. Child(ren) information, Incident report). It will be a big win if parents can spending much less time and effort to achieve this. Meanwhile, if staff can receive child(ren)'s profile in a more efficient and accurate way, so that they can have more cuddle time for child(ren). The parent app is a big product which contains 4 main features and many sub-features. We divided those features into different of product development release plans. So that we can have a MVP product to put in the market as soon as possible. And improve it by collecting user's feedback and revising the product in the following releases. If we have to fail, we choose to fail fast. Apart from the product development strategy, here I'm going to show a process of mapping out the information architect for the child profile feature and implement to wireframe and prototype. BackgroundThe traditional way of doing daycare and OSHC(Out of School Hours Care) casual booking involves lots of conversations and work between service staff and parents. And there’s a big margin for the errors. We developed an app for parents to solve the communication problem and digitize the process to reduce the manual work. User ResearchWe did a few user researches around the parent app, from the high-level vision to the specific problems. From the study, we mapped out the casual booking journey and discovered the pain points throughout the process. Parent User Interview: We did a session of parent user interview to map out their offline journey to make casual booking and a cart sorting activity to identify the pain points for this feature: Cart-sorting: We prepared some features on the cards, and asked parent users to select the cards out for their “Must-Have”, “Nice-to-Have” and “Won’t-Have”. We then asked them to use colour dots to vote for priorities. Throughout the activity and conversation, we discovered their problems and pain points about the feature. Parents made some comments which could help us to design the functionalities:
Service Staff Interview: Although this parent app is for parents, however, it has two types of end users. Service staff needs to provide data for parents to consume. We did similar activities for the staff, and the key finding was to prevent parents to cancel permanent booking as this can impact their capacity management. Co-Design"Product design is a team sport to bring all the ideas together and select them out." To get to know the user needs better, we organised a co-design workshop to design this feature with our end users together. From the study we had before, we identified the goal for the feature: Digitize the casual booking process to reduce manual work for parents and services. In the session, we invited 5 users mixed up of service staff and parents. We asked them to sketch out their ideas without limitation. Then each person could have 2 minutes to present their ideas to the group. In the end, they discussed the ideas, voted and combined into one final design. As facilitators, we took notes for users ideas and comments. DesignFrom the previous user study and co-design, we have enough information to start design this feature. First of all, we list out the functionalities and mapped them in a user flow in a logical way: Then we did low-fidelity wireframe and get our stakeholders to review: And the interactive map:
"Do more in less time, move fast and build strong." The BackgroundLast September, I joined a software company which has various of products for empowering the child care industry. The products are very powerful in functionalities and in a leading position of this industry. However, the products look completely different, even within the same product for different features. Our designers and engineers spend lots of time on tweaking pixels and unnecessary discussions for UI components. By lacking of design system, the design debt has built high. We have 50 different shades of colors, 10 typographics, 15 different style of buttons, tables and forms etc. The inconsistency causes many issues. To make our products becoming to one family, increasing the accuracy and efficiency for design & development and reducing design debt, we need a way to consistently share style, components and patterns across multiple products. The goal is to create a system with one source of truth, that would automatically update and keep all our designs and products in sync. The TeamWe decided to build up a team to execute this project. We need the stakeholders from each team to contribute and provide their perspective of insights. By communicating with our people, we have brought two designers, two POs, one marketing manager and one tech lead on board. Definition of QKStyleQKStyle is a comprehensive guide and resource library contains everything needed to design with QK products, including core principles, visual design, interface components, branding, and resources to help us deliver a seamless and integrated service. QKStyle should be the standardized only source of truth and not be the inconsistent style reference. QKStyle should be always evolving and not be a once off build. QKStyle should be synchronizing all the changes to QK products and not failed in version control . The Design PracticesWe list out all the elements need to work on and grouped them into 3 epics. For transparency, we setup a design wall to display all the features and track the movements and progress. The feature cards stay under each epic in backlog. Every week, We run a standup in front of the design wall to talk about the progress, questions, problems and pick up cards for next week to do. We also setup up a monthly meeting for higher level stakeholders to review and discuss the work. The Living SolutionThe living solution allows the UI components to stay consistent across Design and Engineering. The graphic below shows the ecosystem at a very high level. The QKStyle was built based on Bootstrap4 as a framework foundation. We re-defined variables and mixins by React. We use these SASS variables and mixins to create re-usable components which can be maintained consistently. We then use these components to build bigger blocks to constitute the QKStyle-UI. All the code, that makes up the living side of the QKStyle, resides in our QKStyle repository in DevOps Microsoft. The QKStyle repository contains the JSON source of truth files defined in boot camp, the SASS partials generated from the JSON, along with other assets. When we want to make a change to it, we pull it from the repository, update it. When the code change is merged to repository, a build for the QKStyle-UI project is kicked off in DevOps automatically. In the end, the compiled UI package will be used as the source of truth for products and living style guide. At the same time, we need to keep Jira updated as well. This Is Not The EndQKStyle isn’t a once-off build. It’s an evolving system that needs to grow, to change, to become better.
Better never stops. Mattress shopping can be hard, as there are so many things to consider and combine. Amart Furniture is delivering a mattress selector to reduce the frustration and make the purchasing process easy and pleasant. What are the problems we may have for purchasing a mattress? To design this selector, we did a survey for our customers to target their pain points of shopping mattresses:
To look at the main competitors in the market, some of them solved above problems in different degrees. However, the selection process is a linear experience and not be able to review selected preferences at the same time and no way to purchase after selection. To solve the problems above and make the mattress purchasing process easier, here are our solutions:
As a busy parent, I normally drop my 2.5 year old son to child care and quickly run to work. I have no time to chat with his educators to be able to know his status at the child care. Also, I feel we've missed a lot of moments of his learning journey. Last week, his teacher said he got hurt and asked me to sign an incident report. It was late, I didn't have enough time to read through the report, and the educator told me he was OK, so I signed it. And I also had a few times forgot to collect his dirty clothes.
Depend on those problems, I was thinking if we can design an app to make the communication between child care workers and parents more efficient? I list out all my problems: 1. Missing my son's moments at child care, and willing to know what activities he's been doing during the day. 2. Lacking of communication to his educators. 3. Willing to track his development such as learning, social, language and motions etc. 4. Willing to have a reminder, so I won't forget the special days - Pajama day, pirate day, show day etc. and of course, picking his dirty clothes. 5. Willing to seek advice when we have problems. 6. Easier way to inform the child care centre his attendance. 7. Share his moments to families and friends. And I list out the possible problems for the child care centre: 1. Tiredly chasing parents to sign forms and reports. 2. Keeping communication easier with parents 3. Sharing children's learning journey with parents to improve the engagement. 4. Easier way to access children's profile to get information - such as allergy food, doctor contact. 5. Easier to manage individual project with children and report to parents. 6. Easier to remind parents some important days and activities. It was a rough 3-hour practice, but I had fun to find ways to resolve the problems. Below are some mockups: Early this year, I led a project to design Kootrip's mobile experience. The product is a travel, car rental and hotel booking platform. To differentiate from Australian competitors, Kootrip chose travel product(activities, trips and tickets) booking as their main business. The target customers are overseas tourists and locals who want to book Australian travel products online. From the study of all the competitors in the market, we found their common weakness was complicated booking process. Challenges of this project included:
The beta mobile site was launched May 2018.
Amart Furniture’s website is visited over 570k by sessions weekly and over 1.1m monthly. Compared to the before re-design, the completed 1st stage (homepage, navigation, categories and finance) has brought up the conversion over 30%. For some major trading period, the conversion sat at 0.7%, and the quantity of sold products has gone up 45%. The results show a successful optimisation has applied to digital experience and increased the engagement to our customers. Thanks for the support from the team, I applied a full design cycle to this re-design project. Deep Research and Constant TestingAnalytics & Heat Mapping As a 40-year old furniture brand in Australia, we have massive amounts of data were available, Google Analytics and Hotjar. The main challenge was sorting through the data to reveal meaningful patterns. I have customised a live data report by Data Studio. It contains all the major metrics for the business, from this, we could tell our weakness and strength. I also included heatmaps, scroll maps and session recordings to help me understand users’ behaviours sThese research help me to see the “what”, but it doesn’t always reveal the “why”. To dive into motivations behind behavior and UX requirements, we need to interview users and stakeholders. I visited the store, as over 70% of customers would do research online before they go to stores. I chose a casual way to start the conversation with these customers: Have you ever visited our website before you came to the store? How do you think of our website? Did you get all the information you need? Do you feel hard to find a product or other information? What features would you like to have on the website? Do you feel frustrated when you are looking for something? Do you like to get inspired from us? etc. Since this project would literally change the digital face of Amart Furniture, I also interviewed executive leadership and product, marketing, sales, and customer support teams. Data-inspired, user-centered design – that’s what we do. We need to interpret data and objectively justify the design decisions whenever possible. Our digital customer journey map When we are done the analysing, most of the issues were revealed, we could prioritise them by the urgency, critical level, development difficulties and resources. IA & Site StructureOnce the team decided on the major variations, I started to re-organise information with the help of our SEO specialist and created site structured based on it. Prototyping/WireframingA very exciting time to create prototyping based on all the research we’ve done. The prototypes need to present to stakeholders for feedback. UI/Visual DesignDuring the visual design stage, I worked closely with our marketing team. It’s also important to note that I kept each steps updated to our developer of the process. So he wouldn’t get surprised by non-practical designs. The major optimisations I made:
The project is still under development, but you check some of the updates here.
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