Washtenaw Area Council for Children

Washtenaw Area
Council for Children

Client

Duration

11 Weeks

Responsibilities

User Experience Research, Interviews, Contextual Inquiry, Affinity Mapping

Team

Akshat Mishra, Bridget Siniakov, Shelby Daniels-Young, Sophia McFadden-Keesling

Overview

Washtenaw Area Council for Children is a non-profit organisation that provides several educational services related to child safety. For each program, they collect data in the form of surveys which are then stored in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

The data is later used in multiple ways such as funder reports, infographics, reports to schools, internal reports, etc.

We helped them streamline their existing information management practices with a series of recommendations based on a series of interviews, contextual studies and background research.

Design Process

Brief outline of the process we followed for this project

Define

Problem definition and scoping

The organization runs several programs such as Safe Baby Education Program, Body Safety Training, Cyber Safety and Cyber Bullying Prevention, etc. Cyber Safety education program is one of their larger programs. They reach about 7000 students every year in Washtenaw County and receive back 5000 survey forms. The current practice is to manually enter these survey forms in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. This spreadsheet acts as a single repository for all their data which is used for multiple purpose such as generating reports, preparing funding related documents, etc. As a small non-profit, they found this practice to be extremely time-consuming and labor intensive. The client wanted us to come up with solutions that can streamline the process of data management and processing for their cyber bullying program. We met the Executive Director of the organization to get a broad overview of the general practices. Based on this interaction, we were able to get a high-level overview of the problem as well as discuss final outcomes.

Understanding current process and practices

Looking beyond the data

We followed contextual inquiry to extract qualitative information. We arranged the interviews to make sure we were interviewing at the exact place of work of the staff. This allowed us to look beyond just the data but also factor in any surrounding factors influencing the present inconsistencies.

Interviews

Our group interviewed 7 staff members in the organization to understand how data was being handled by everyone and to understand everyone’s responsibilities within the organization better.

Prior to the interviews, we prepared a list of interviewee categories and developed relevant research questions for each category. This formed the basis for our interview protocol, which become crucial part of interviewing process. It helped us get important information as well as allow a deeper conversation surrounding these processes.

Contextual Studies

We held debriefing session post every interview with all the team members to note down all the crucial findings from the interview.

Analysis

Synthesizing key research findings and brainstorming recommendations

After we completed interviewing, we combined all the important points from the interviews. We used Affinity Mapping for the analysis. Affinity Mapping is a process of clustering relevant themes to unearth key issues and patterns.

Deriving Insights

From our analysis, we derived the following insights:

There are formal and informal systems for making changes to survey design, but there is no single cohesive system.
The data entry process is inconsistent due to interns’ and volunteers’ short stay and varied level of experience.
Lack of centralized workflow access to the storage drives leads to organizational inefficiency.
Current data management solutions need improvement in simplicity, comprehensibility, and uniformity.
As a whole, the organization believes that reports and visualizations are key to conveying effectiveness to board members and school administrators.
Funders have an indirect influence on the WACC’s data collection and processing, as well as data management.

Outcomes

Every organisation has different constraints such as budget, technical expertise, etc. We extracted important parameters that would make the solution likely to work the best in the organisation’s context and began brainstorming different solutions. Our initial brainstorming session was to stretch the possibilities without considering any constraints. We wanted to see how an ideal case would look like and then brought in the organisational constraints which we found were crucial. Using these we ranked our solutions from the most suitable to the least.

Takeaways

This project was a great opportunity to learn the intricacies of interviewing with an intent. Since, this was a course project, we had an opportunity to delve deeper into each stage of performing a contextual study and interviewing people.

The greatest realization from the project was to ask the right questions, and ask a lot. Most problems do not exist in a vacuum and all it takes is a conversation to reach discoveries and successful results.

Thank you, The Stacks for being the strength and life of this project. I cannot thank you all enough for your contributions to this project.