Mariana is an administrator at a foster care agency in Northern California. She manages dozens of hirings per month for positions that need to be screened because they deal directly with California youth. For this, she has to enter them into the Community Care Licensing software called Guardian which manages the screening process both for agency users like her and the CCL staff that do the screening. She’s often frustrated at how long it takes for CCL to get back to her when she has questions about an applicant. Many screenings clear in a week or so, but some can take as long as 120 days to process, and those often require multiple phone calls or emails just to find out what’s going on.

I used an empathy probe with several end users of Guardian who order CCL background screenings regularly. This interaction allowed me to gain an understanding of their thoughts and feelings about their challenges with Guardian.

Themes: TIME and RESPONSIVENESS

• People would rather serve themselves than be on hold or wait for emails.
• Guardian is a challenge to learn quickly because of its complexity. The users that love it today took a long time to learn it.
• The guardian enthusiasts are happy to share their knowledge with those trying to learn it.
• Contact with CCL is limited and there’s no one to reach out to for help learning the software.

As we can’t change the Guardian software or add much more to their staff workload, we had to think outside the box on this one. When we settled on this as a direction, we quickly came up with a number of concepts, including

• Guardian Helper – A chatbot that can answer common questions and possibly direct users to a live text chat with a service representative, if they can add that to their phone and email duties.
• Guardian Sandbox – A consequence-free version of the Guardian interface, backed by a database of simulated data that doesn’t contain anyone’s personal information and which is wiped nightly. Lets anyone train themselves on the interface.
• Guardian Interconnect – A crowd-sourced question-and-answer forum where users can answer each other’s questions and share their experience with the system around.

GUARDIAN INTERCONNECT

This is a forum where users can ask questions and receive answers from other users. Users can vote questions and answers up or down, and the aggregate score will place them in the order of most useful to least useful.

Readers familiar with Reddit or Stack Exchange may recognize this style of voting metric, as it’s an underpinning feature of both of those sites.

We took this prototype to the users we had interviewed before and got positive responses. The biggest concern was one of legitimacy; one user wanted to know if it was clear that the answers were not provided by CCL itself and rather by other users like them. To aid in making this distinction clear, I added a disclaimer to the final version and changed the branding a little to make it clear what kind of resource it is. There were also some concerns over trolling and inappropriate answers that can be addressed with a report-to-administrator button.

These are all of the example pages of the final prototype:

Farmers’ markets might seem like a simple affair, but once you dig under the surface you start to find a number of problems and inefficiencies. In my case, what I found was a lack of consistent messaging. It wasn’t easy for customers to find the vendors with the products they were looking for. Even when those vendors were known, it could take a lot of time and a lot of energy to check all the prices—and those prices are likely to change as the day wears on.

After investigating the market for insights and going through a few rounds of sketched ideas, I’d settled on an innovation to help with this problem: an app that could guide people through a market, highlighting deals and showing exactly where products they desired and their favorite vendors were located. It would need to crowdsource its data, of course, I’d learned that the vendors at the markets were far too busy to do much of that on their own.

This is what the prototype looked like in the field. A simple cardboard backing holding a set of cards representing the screens of the app, held together by a 2-inch binder ring. Simple, straightforward, and easy to make. This is what I put into the hands of customers at the market.

Here’s the entire original set of cards from the prototype laid out side by side.

So I took this prototype out into the field at another farmers’ market and got some interesting feedback from the customers there.

• I’m worried about this idea because it could cause problems similar to map software directing too many people down side streets.
• We need to be able to search from anywhere.
• I don’t like list menus. This would work much better with icons.
• The app should only show you what you can do at any given moment.
• It took me too long to find the pretzels here. I want to see where they are on a map.
• This isn’t needed, the market is too small for it.
• I really want to know more about specific vendors.

After receiving this feedback, I made an updated version of the prototype incorporating some of the suggestions and attempting to make sure it would work for everyone.