Parent's and Admin's experiences
Booking enhancement
Problem and Challenges
The system currently allows parents to book a single child at once. They can also make multiple single bookings. Though when parents have more than 1 child and need to book them in, the app allows them to make it, but only with multiple taps to complete the flow. Hence, the process takes time and effort.
Besides, with The Office, the centre admin, especially admins at OSHC (Out of School Hours Care), finds it time-consuming to manage and control incoming booking requests while having enough staff to stay within the educator-to-child ratio.
Key problems
Project Overview
Category: Mobile app and Web app
Scope of work: User research, Usability testing, UI - UX design
Company: Xplor Education
Background
The Home application is designed for parents to control their children's daily activities and engage with the childcare centre to ensure everything is in order.
The Office is a web-based application designed for centre admins to manage children at their centres and communicate with parents.
Discover Phase
We conducted user research to understand parents' and admins' pain points and needs.
We found that parents wanted a more efficient and user-friendly booking process. Also, based on their feedback via Typeform, they mentioned that booking for several days or multiple children takes a lot of time. Still, the current version allows them to add bookings to the basket (up to 30), but it seems unnoticeable to our users.
Goal
Simplify and enhance the booking request process for administrators and parents in Office and Home.
Wireframe for the tech feasibility - Home app - before the user testing
Definition - Information Architecture
We define how we want to break our project into phases.
Phase 1: We picked the problem theme to work on for both parents and admins
For parents: multiple single bookings, recurring booking ( we have 2 types: weekly and fortnight) and communication with the centre.
And for admins, we work on receiving the booking notification with multiple children, accepting the booking or rejecting bookings with the note.
Phase 2: We will focus more on the admins' side, with the room capacity setting and cut-off time.
Home and Office high level IA
Testing
We created a working prototype for both Home and Office to test with users.
With the new design for the booking process in Home, most can complete the flow in 2 scenarios, "single booking" and "recurring booking", without difficulty. That's a first win, but then I got some questions about bulk days booking and booking cancelling.
Still, in stage 2, we will have some more time to work on the research and tech feasibility, back and forth between Office and Home, and then we will figure out the solution.
Create new booking prototype - Home app
Reflection
This project was a successful first step in improving the booking experience for both parents and administrators. While there is still room for improvement, especially with OSHC work, we have made significant progress towards our goal.
It's a chance for me to improve my skills in testing and research in collaboration with the stakeholders and learn how the project could be changed and adjusted to make it work smoothly.
OSHC admins' problem theme - OSHC research
OSHC admins' problem theme - Booking research
With the admins' research in OSHC which was done earlier by my colleague while I was focusing on the parent's perspective, it shows us that our users want Office to be OSHC-friendly, which means they should be able to configure the room capacity and closing time for better booking management.
Affinity mapping
With the admins' first iteration, putting 2 children in one booking seems complicated for them to take action on the booking. For the room capacity flow, most can complete the daily capacity change.
Still, with capacity editing in bulk, a few need clarification with the calendar view at first glance until they hover the mouse and figure out that they can edit from it.
Also, some feedbacks say we should change the terminology for the available options to avoid confusion, i.e., "Unavailable" instead of "blocked.”
Booking received - Office