Project Overview
Blue School is a scientific outreach initiative that assists students and teachers to conduct a water audit in their school, develop an action plan and then implement those actions to reduce water consumption in the school and beyond.
The goal is to develop a web based solution that streamlines the current data collection process, and allows greater collaboration between teachers and students.
Client
Team composition
My involvement
As the only designer on the team, I work with the zoo and developer to deliver an engaging experience for our users. I determined the design process following the standard user-centric approach, with modified components based on the project needs, some of these components are:
Conducted user interviews via phone and emails to get to know more about our users
From initial research, I imagined how the user is going to be traveling through the application
Tested iterations of my design on various types of user
Iterated the designs based on the feedback from my users
The Challenge
Blue Schools piloted their first program in 2018 with 5 participating schools, this year, the goal is to increase this number from 5 to 9. During the initial pilot, the data collection was conducted using PDFs and Excel sheets. There is currently no way to consolidate and keep track of these data collected, or for teachers and students to collaborate on this data entry process.
Expected Outcomes
9 schools will be using the web based solution as part of the second cohort of Blue Schools in 2019. The solution will allow teachers and students to collaborate on data entry process from their desktop, tablet or mobile phone. The interface will allow students to gain a deeper understanding of how each entry is related to the big picture. Teacher will have an easier way to keep track and manage multiple classes. For Toronto Zoo, the consolidation of these data will prove to be helpful to monitor water conservation efforts across multiple schools in the future.
Learnings
Through talking to teachers, I realized they are very busy professionals that doesn’t have 30 minutes for a user interview. When user interview data is lacking, I can always compliment it with other form of data, such as looking at other apps, evaluation sheets and survey results.
I wish I had more time to do extensive user testing, but as with real life projects, eventually we will have to stop testing and start shipping, because there are project milestones to hit.
