From Friction to flow

Stream­lin­ing a Crit­i­cal Process

Strategy

Stake­hold­er dis­cus­sions revealed plen­ty of issues:

• School admin­is­tra­tion was con­cerned about the legal expo­sure from the cur­rent forms, as well as hav­ing up-to-date par­ent con­tact infor­ma­tion and stu­dent health information.
• Teach­ers were frus­trat­ed at the process as a whole — it took pre­cious time out of their already busy day, and required them to per­form mul­ti­ple steps — going from room to room, floor to floor, print­ing, scan­ning, and emailing.
• Par­ents were annoyed at hav­ing to print out the form (“No print­er, “out of ink/paper!”) and pro­vide con­tact infor­ma­tion that the school already had.

My vision was to cre­ate a stream­lined dig­i­tal-based process which addressed all of these issues. I aimed to make tech­nol­o­gy do the heavy lift­ing when­ev­er pos­si­ble. Of course, stu­dent safe­ty was the heart of the mat­ter, and I kept this in mind through­out the project.

Suc­cess would be mea­sured by a reduc­tion in time spent on the task, qual­i­ta­tive feed­back from teach­ers and par­ents, approval from legal, and increased fre­quen­cy of updates in the Stu­dent Infor­ma­tion Sys­tem (SIS).

Discovery

User Interviews & Testing

I observed a teacher work through the pro­ce­dure of procur­ing signed field trip autho­riza­tions, not­ing the time it took to do each step. This par­tic­u­lar teacher was quite tech savvy. Many teach­ers at the school were less tech­no­log­i­cal­ly inclined, and had con­sid­er­ably more dif­fi­cul­ty dur­ing this process. So, 30 min­utes was on the fast side.

Process Overview

The process involved quite a bit of work on the teacher and par­ents part, involv­ing scan­ning, print­ing, writ­ing, and email­ing. Here is the breakdown:

Content Audit

A review of the per­mis­sion slip con­tent showed that it was lack­ing in any legal lia­bil­i­ty lan­guage, and asked for redun­dant infor­ma­tion. Fur­ther­more, the school had recent­ly gone through a re-brand, and the form was out­dat­ed not only aes­thet­i­cal­ly, func­tion­al­ly. The school want­ed to be seen as mature and inno­v­a­tive; the form pro­ject­ed neither.

The school’s legal coun­cil rec­om­mend­ed that I down­load the field trip per­mis­sion slips from the NYC Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion (DOE) and use that as a tem­plate so all our legal bases would be covered.

Analysis

Workflow, Personas & Storyboards

I sketched out a work­flow dia­gram, track­ing the state of the form as it gath­ered and trans­mit­ted information.

Then I cre­at­ed per­sonas based on 2 teach­ers and 2 par­ents. The sto­ry­boards were based on these par­ents and teach­ers mak­ing their way through the work­flow in dif­fer­ent scenarios.

The sto­ry­boards fur­ther informed the work­flow dia­gram, which then became the basis for the design.

Production

After exten­sive test­ing, pro­duc­tion was rather straight­for­ward. I sim­ply embed­ded the form into our web tem­plate with an easy-to-remem­ber URI. I then added the URI to our intranet and made an announce­ment to the teach­ers in email and in person.

The final prod­uct, from the teach­ers’ point of view is below:

After the teacher sub­mit­ted the form, the par­ent process began:

The soft­ware filled out a PDF tem­plate and sent it via email to each par­tic­i­pant. I worked with the school’s tech sup­port com­pa­ny to con­fig­ure our serv­er and print­er so the form would print automatically.