CASE STUDY
Managing complex allocations and waitlists in child care.
Amanda Read and Tania Gray are sisters and devoted mums who had seen the struggles of kindergartens and child care facilities in dealing with enrolments and waitlists. The process was poorly coordinated, time consuming and done with shared spreadsheets which weren’t up to the task. They had an idea to solve it…
Year:
2015-2016
Role:
Lead designer
Methods:
• Client discovery workshops
• Lean design iteration
• Site and Journey mapping
• UI prototyping
A lean partnership
My clients were a start-up and wanted to explore where their idea could go. To optimise their budget and mitigate risk, we encouraged a lean approach – do just enough to test and validate the concept with sessional kindergartens and child care centers. We complemented this approach with genuine collaboration with our clients who had a previous poor experience with another developer and wanted to be hands-on with us. I relished the opportunity to develop trusting and robust relationships with Amanda and Tania, and to coach them through a quality design process.
I conducted a workshops with Amanda and Tania to better understand the problem and explore solutions.
From this I understood enough to design a simple concept prototype which demonstrated a manager’s ability to oversee room occupancy, registrations, payments and confirm placements.
The fidelity was just high enough to communicate the features and gauge whether the market saw value in it. It was important that it didn’t look like a finished product so that the audience felt they could provide an honest response and felt that their feedback could contribute to the product’s evolution.
Close, but no cigar
Amanda and Tania presented the prototype to a number of their contacts in the industry and quickly identified two key insights that would guide the product forward:
the greatest interest came from child care centres rather than sessional kinders due to: their higher enrolment numbers at around 150 children per centre; irregular booking patterns; need for casual bookings; and legislatively mandated ratios in individual rooms, across age groups and the centre as a whole; and
allocating children to the rooms was the true problem to solve, as it engaged complex and multi-layered considerations including: the number of children; varying ages and preferences of care (number of days, which days, sibling care, etc); legislative ratios; and optimisation of room occupancy.
~ Design Challenge ~
How do we help child care managers to efficiently place children within centers in order to optimise room capacity, meet legislated ratios and be considerate of parents’ requirements for care?
Pivoting toward success
We pivoted and dug into the problem of allocation for child care centres. We learned that the process of allocating children to rooms was the biggest point of pain for managers who found that it was highly complex, mentally exhausting and time-consuming.
Due to the extreme complexity of allocations at scale we concluded that the product needed to flex some algorithmic muscle.
I worked with our development team to explore how we could design a system that would intelligently identify and allocate children in order to optimise room occupancy and meet ratio requirements while also being considerate of parents’ preferences for care.
The result was a system that could evaluate all children based on age, number of days required, days of week, sibling attendance and so on and assign each child a priority score. Furthermore, facilities could customise the rules that were applied to calculation priority.
The system would then autofill rooms across the centre on behalf of the manager (who could also make edits where needed) and also suggest best fits for any vacancies that arose during the year. This saved managers a tremendous amount of time and effort.
Once the scale and depth of the requirements of an allocations optimiser were identified and understood by the team, I generated a number of further iterations of the product informed by site and journey mapping. Each design iteration drew out different aspects of the challenges faced in allocations, seeking to test which would be best received by end users. I integrated ongoing feedback from my clients and their industry contacts, and was buoyed by the enthusiastic feedback we received from child care centres with each new approach to them.
Key Features
Quick centre setup
As with any startup it is important that new users can pick up the software with minimal fuss and experience value as early as possible. I designed an onboarding process which focussed on quick and easy setup for new centres.
Oversight of critical information
Within the dashboard managers can clearly see current occupancy and waitlist numbers for each room and quickly identify where vacancies need to be filled. Managers can also view this information for upcoming weeks, to be informed of expected changes in occupancy and act to fill upcoming vacancies ahead of time.
Smart vacancy filling
Filling vacancies is made easy, as the system alerts managers ahead of time and provides a shortlist of children that would best fill the vacancy based on priority score. The manager can simply select one of these children or view others in the list.
Offer generation
Notifications and reminders about payments, renewals and waiting list statuses are automatically sent to parents.
“We love Alliance. They brought our product to life! They were collaborative, transparent, responsive and friendly so we felt in control of our project”
— Amanda Read Co-founder, EnrolNow
Outcomes
From a small enquiry from clients who thought they might have an idea, I designed and delivered a nuanced and complex allocations system underpinned by rigorous algorithms and wrapped up in intuitive and aesthetically appealing design. EnrolNow demonstrates the critical value of understanding businesses, deploying a lean approach to rapidly validate and gather new inputs, and pivot in response.
In fact, as the final product rolled out to child care centres it was also taken up by sessional kindergartens and kinder management groups who immediately recognised the value of EnrolNow in their setting as well as child care centres.