For Providers
For the full mockup, please go:
Background
Child care work is essential but undervalued. Among people who work as child care providers, 96% of them are female, 40% are people of color, 20% are immigrants, 50% have dependent children, 61% have 10 more years experience. They work on average 64 hours a week, and only make $23,000 annual income.
March 2018, I joined Pie for Providers, a company builds an online App to help child care providers with their business. More specifically, it helps child care providers to manage their subsidy cases and business expense.
For more updated information, please visit http://www.pieforproviders.com/
Process Research Data --- A repeatable process
When I joined the team, they've done over 45 one-on-one interviews with child care providers and many associations in the Chicago area. To understand the big amount of data and make it clear for the team to use was the first task.
Here is how my process looks like:
BITS OF DATA -- understand research data
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What their daily work look like?
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What are their concerns?
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What tools they currently use?
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What takes the most time at work? etc...
CLUSTERS OF DATA & LOOK FOR RELATIONSHIPS
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Trello board & sticky notes exercise
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Compare to MVP features, think of what else do we need
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FINDING NEW OPPORTUNITIES​​​
Prototype and test --- 2-week sprint
Build new mock-ups
Quick prototypes on paper and then develop high-fidelity mock-ups on screen
View more mock-ups: https://invis.io/ZQN1A53UM59
Challenges:
The first and also the most happened challenge was to deal with user interviews that have multiple goals. Many of my interviews have both marketing goals and usability testing goals. This would interpret users and potentially can't get enough information as I expected.
Solutions:
1. Hierarchy -- I always schedule 45-60 minutes interviews with users. So I can use about 3-5 minutes to introduce our product and build the connection with them. Then, depends on what are the goals for that interview I'd have about 20 minutes for the first goal, and 20 minutes for the second one. In the end, I'll ask if there's any question they think I'd ask, or they have any other questions.
2. Keep organic -- I always have a research plan with many details, includes what are the questions I'll ask. What I want to know. What I should present. For mock-up testing, I'd have slides with images and simple texts. But during the conversations, I'll try to keep it organic and make sure interviewees can open more to me.
3. Show empathy -- As a mom, I really respect these women. So everytime when I say 'oh that sounds really hard' I really meant it. And when you are being sincere, people can feel it. The parenthood experience definitely made interviewees and I build stronger connections.
Some other photos at work
A typical day at a group child care provider's place for interview
Went to Midwest Women in Tech (MWiT) Conference at UI Labs