Marcus Elliott

Work

About

Optimizing digital attendance checkin

I worked on a leading B2B SaaS platform designed to help after-school programs optimize student management. With powerful tools for tracking attendance, logging grades, and managing events. I worked with them to elevate the user experience and identified key opportunities to boost customer conversions through their attendance feature.

Role

Lead Product Designer

Time

3 Months

Team

Project Manager, Leadership , Development

Responsibilities

Strategy, Design, Customer Research

Problem

Mentors using the attendance feature struggled with managing after school events due to the current interface. Creating events and tracking student attendance were challenging, leading to lower adoption, higher churn, and frequent feature abandonment.

Mentors using B.Combs’ attendance feature struggled with managing after-school events due to the current interface.

Creating events and tracking student attendance were challenging, leading to lower adoption, higher churn, and frequent feature abandonment.

Solution

After I spoke with different mentors I focused on addressing these problems specific in the user interface; information hierarchy, missing CTAS, and an inefficient process to send event invitations.

Research

How We Started

To begin I had a series of meetings across several organizations that we serviced and a few clients who were on the fence to get a better idea of their needs and to see if i could find patterns in their challenges

Meet Our Users

Annie is a mentor who manages after school programs for students. She is tasked with logging attendance for multiple students on the day of events and has to make sure they are arrive on time to their programs.

User Interview Goals

Goal 1

I want to know how mentors are currently registering students for events?

Goal 2

I want to know what external challenges mentors face outside of just the application?

Goal 3

I want to know if there any unique check-in needs that mentors have that the current interface cant meet?

Pain Points

Too many kids not enough mentors

The number of students for any given event can be far too much for 1 mentor to handle effectively

Navigation

A lot of clients report genreally being confused about how to create and input there student attendance lists

Excel already has some user lock-in

Some clients are already using excel for attendance logging.

What I learned: A Problem to solve

With my research conducted I learned that in order to create and maintain user adoption I had to look past the interface and focus on the real world issues that the mentors were experiencing.

Design

The Redesign

Once I understood the problem holistically I was able to make some key enhancements to the current design which corrected a number of previous problems.

Before

Figure 1.3 Original Attendance Home Page

After

Figure 1.4 Redesigned Attendance Home Page

Updated Dashboard

Updating the UI and information hierarchy improves readability and optimizes workflow

Status Bars

Status tabs indicate the progress of an event giving more context to the user

Calendar

Calendars prioritize users upcoming event and aid in optimizing personal work flow

Event Links

Clients can access and send links to students to register for events from the events dashboard

Before

Figure 1.5 Original Attendance Input Page

After

Figure 1.6 Redisgned Attendance Input Page

Event Creation IA

I reworked the layout for the event input form and made additional fields based on user research

Import CSV

The Import CSV provides a way for a user to mass input attendance further expiditing the process

Multi-Day Events

the addition of multi-day events settings allows the user to save time when creating mulitple events with the same group of students

Color Coding

Color Codes for Present, Late, and Excused gives a second affordance to notify the user of the status they have input

Strategy

The Approach

After doing some preliminary research to understand the problems better I realized that the solutions had to be efficient and lean in order to ease the work load on our users. I joined with our leadership team to show them my findings and we came up with some guiding principles to center our design around.

Guiding Principles

Lean Solutions

We needs quick lean solutions that can be tested and iterated on in a timely fashion.

Modernize

The current interface needs a more modern look this is ultimately going to instill more trust in current and future users.

Efficiency

The mentors are out numbered by the students they need an efficient way to check them all in.

Innovate

Listen to ideas across all teams that could help solve this problem never count anyones input out.

What I learned: The Path Forward

Being new to the company meant that i would need to value the insights across all teams incorporating the business needs and the user needs when implementing my strategy.

Where we innovated

After redesigning the previous pages for input we were also able ti make some additions to fursther lighten the burden on attendance input and registration for our users

Figure 1.7 CSV Modal

Time-Saving

this system saves time for the mentors sense many of them were already using excel to create attendance

Parent Event Page

This Page gives parents immediate access to their child's events

Design

The Redesign

Once I understood the problem holistically I was able to make some key enhancements to the current design which corrected a number of previous problems.

Before

Figure 1.3 Original Attendance Home Page

After

Figure 1.4 Redesigned Attendance Home Page

Updated Dashboard

Updating the UI and information hierarchy improves readability and optimizes workflow

Status Bars

Status tabs indicate the progress of an event giving more context to the user

Calendar

Calendars prioritize users upcoming event and aid in optimizing personal work flow

Event Links

Clients can access and send links to students to register for events from the events dashboard

Before

Figure 1.5 Original Attendance Input Page

After

Figure 1.6 Redisgned Attendance Input Page

Event Creation IA

I reworked the layout for the event input form and made additional fields based on user research

Import CSV

The Import CSV provides a way for a user to mass input attendance further expediting the process

Multi-Day Events

the addition of multi-day events settings allows the user to save time when creating mulitple events with the same group of students

Color Coding

Color Codes for Present, Late, and Excused gives a second affordance to notify the user of the status they have input

Figure 1.3 QR Code Mobile

Parent Event Page

This Page gives parents immediate access to their child's events

Quick Registration

Parents are able to access and register for events before they start which lightens the load on day of registration

Where we innovated

After redesigning the previous pages for input we were also able ti make some additions to fursther lighten the burden on attendance input and registration for our users

After redesigning the previous pages for input we were also able t0 make some additions to further lighten the burden on attendance input and registration for our users

Figure 1.7 CSV Modal

Scalability

Using the CSV allows for organizations to scale as the grow larger and add more events

Time-Saving

this system saves time for the mentors sense many of them were already using excel to create attendance

Figure 1.3 QR Code Mobile

Parent Event Page

This Page gives parents immediate access to their child's events

Quick Registration

Parents are able to access and register for events before they start which lightens the load on day of registration

Outcomes

Results

up to

800 hrs

saved annually for users

projected

50%

increase in customer satisfaction

acquired

3

new clients from redesign

Usability Testing Highlights

5 out of 5 mentors confirm that the new attendance tracking would lighten their load and be easy to teach in onboarding

Current sales team says that the new version has exactly what they need to pitch to schools and mentor groups

Parents love the ability to preregister their students for mentoring events

Outcomes

Results

up to

800 hrs

saved annually for users

projected

50%

increase in customer satisfaction

acquired

3

new clients from redesign

Lets Work Together

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