Already successfully connecting parents with local babysitters, Bambino wanted to increase it's sit request success rate. Our user research confirmed a strong desire and need for a more sophisticated availability scheduling.
ROLE
User Researcher, Lead UX + UI Designer, Project Manager
TOOLS
Illustrator, MyBalsamiq, Sketch, Invision, Pencil + Paper
TEAM
Ramon Martinez, Jared Gambatese
Accelerate sit request success rate.
Reduce number of unnecessary requests.
More accurately present available sitters to parent user group.
An initial round of user interviews were conducted with the sitter user group, followed by a round of in person testing of various prototypes.
Is there a need for our solution?
Is it more intuitive to outline when sitters are available, or when hey are unavailable?
How do users interact with existing calendaring applications and systems?
Is our solution intuitive, or does it cause confusion and frustration?
Users are champing at bit for this feature.
Users are as comfortable outlining when they are unavailable as they are with outlining when they aren't available.
If clearly communicated, it doesn't matter which of the two approaches is used.
Typically, one is asked "when can you work" however almost all calendaring systems operate with the assumption that you are available until you populate when you are unavailable. Our comparative analysis confirmed this, now we needed to talk to users to see how they think about it.
Archetype based on user (sitter) research, these sentiments repeatedly surfaced during interviews.
I'd like a way to outline my schedule so I don't receive requests for times i can't sit.
There's no way to know if the sitters I request are available or not, the system should only suggest sitters who are available for the times I need.
Armed with research from our users, we did a few quick design studio sessions to explore functionality concepts.
Taking the strongest elements from our design studio work, we created a paper prototype for user testing.
Users understood either method, specifying times when available or specifying times when unavailable but preferred to outline when they are unavailable.
The visual representation caused confusion.
Cancel/Submit/Clear functionality needed to be refined and streamlined.
While testing the paper prototype with the team at Bambino, we learned that this feature had already been designed by three other teams though never released. Rather than bring another design to the table, we discussed what was liked/disliked about the previous designs and why the project never moved forward.
Our final solution was shaped from various elements of multiple designs but informed by our research into the difference between “When can / When can’t you work”.
