A mobile and desktop app that bridges communication between teachers and parents to keep their children safe during the COVID-19 pandemic.
1st Place Advanced Team – HackDuke's IDEATE Designathon
Overview
Carefull was created during HackDuke's IDEATE 2020 designathon under the Health category. This category focused on "designing a technological solution to improve the quality, efficiency, and accessibility of health care".
Due to the time of the designation (Nov. 2020), my team decided to come up with a solution that emphasized health concerns related to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. During this time, we also saw a rise in the number of concerns about bringing students back to school. With these concerns in mind, we decided to create a solution that would help students in a younger age group. Younger individuals need more responsibility from parents and teachers alike. Adding a pandemic would challenge those responsibilities.
Together, we created Carefull, a mobile and desktop app that bridges communication between teachers and parents to keep their children safe during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Carefull aims to help elementary school teachers and parents keep track of their children's safety while they attend school amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. For parents, Carefull is a mobile app that lets parents log their child’s symptoms. For teachers, Carefull is a desktop app that allows them to view their entire classes. From there, teachers can identify potential health risks from students and prepare accordingly.
Ideation
During our limited timeframe, my team and I underwent various iteration sessions to flesh out our design ideas for our app.
After discussing Carefull's features, each team member created their own user flow for our audiences. We divided our audience into two categories: parents and teachers.
After discussing our first iterations of the mobile app, we then worked together to create a cohesive set of low fidelity wireframes for the mobile app. We decided to focus on the student symptoms form parents would complete on a day-to-day basis in the mobile app.
In our final brainstorming session, we created wireframes for the desktop app that would be utilized by teachers. We also included a section for teachers to send out messages to parents and students to help streamline communication during the pandemic.
Designing Carefull with my team mates was my first designathon experience. This experience opened my eyes to the fast-pace needed to create a product within the time constraints of a weekend-long designathon. It also helped me understand the necessary communication needed when working with teams, especially in design teams. My team consistently checked up on each other and deliberated on various components of our design together which was drastically different to projects where I worked by myself.
If my team and I did have more time to work on Carefull, we would have hoped to focus on the following areas:
Conduct User Research: With more time, my team would have focused on user research by conducting surveys and interviews with our target audience. We would have also liked to conduct usability testing with our final design and adjust our app accordingly.
Research HIPAA and Other Privacy Guidelines: One of the biggest concerns we had was whether or not users would be willing to share health-related information to teachers/schools. If we did have more time, my team and I would have wanted to research privacy guidelines such as HIPAA to ensure our app is trustworthy and abides the law.