Skiddy

The Problem

Most ski teachers find the way they take care of their administration awful. They need to take A4 sized sheets of paper with them up the mountain that contains the information of the children. They need to check these at the start of every day to check if all the students are present.

Furthermore, there is no good way to find lost children. Say someone fell and no one noticed, there's no way to find out where this child is. And someone who finds the child has no idea what teacher this child belongs to.

Teachers like to take pictures and videos of their students to share with the parents, but some of them feel uncomfortable with sharing their phone numbers with the parents, since they're not particularly close with most of them.

Finally, parents feel a bit left out of the lessons and feel like they don't get a lot of information about what is going on.

Track & Trace

In order for the children to be found we discussed a couple of different possibilities:

GPS trackers were our first idea, which in theory would be a pretty good idea, however these don’t work great in the cold and would be quite exposed in the form factor were looking for.

Our second idea were QR codes that would lead to a page filled with the teacher’s info and a way for the person who found the child to lead them back to the teacher. To us this was the better solution, this could easily be implemented with items like jerseys or stickers.

Research insights

Teacher interviews

Teachers don’t want parents to be able to track them all the time. Some already struggle with overprotective parents, and they don’t want to enable them.

Teachers want easier administration. Currently they’re lugging around multiple A4 papers with the kids’ info on them and use those to do head counts.

Teachers will often take pictures of children. They want to share these with the parents, but don’t want to give out their personal phone numbers to every stranger.

Parent survey

Parents love seeing action pictures of their kids. They love getting the pictures that teachers take.

Parents want clear information about their kids’ abilities. They want to know where they can take their children when they’re not in class, and don’t know how to judge this themselves.

Parents want to know what their children have been up to. They would like an overview of the days activities after the lessons. This gives them something to talk about with their kids and gives them the feeling of being more involved with the lessons.

Desk Research

The weather on the mountain can differ drastically day to day and even hour to hour. I need to make sure my app is usable in all different types of weather. I'm using a dark background to contrast better with the snowy white backdrop of the surrounding mountain. Likewise, I also take accessibility in mind. Single-handed use will most likely be the norm since you don't really want to take your gloves off on top of the mountain. Especially not during a snowstorm. Because of this I want to make sure everyone is able to use this app with just one hand.

Privacy &
Helicopter Parents

We had to make some serious decisions on how we wanted to tackle privacy issues. Some were easier, such as the photo sharing, which had an opt-in in the form parents had to fill in prior to the lessons.

One of the main concerns addressed by the teachers was that sharing current gps locations would enable helicopter parents, who would follow them around all day and keep disturbing the lesson. Some teachers already struggled with this immensely and in the end we decided to go with not sharing the location with the parents in real-time. At the end of the day this would be shared to the parent’s side of the app, so they would know what their children had been up to that day.

The danger of assumptions

One of our (wrong) assumptions was that the person who found the child could lead them back to their teacher, however we later learned that the current modus operandi would be for the child to stay put. They’re told not to go with strangers and allow the teacher to retrace their steps to find back the child.

Because we’d already worked out some of the functionality for this we already assumed the teacher would have their GPS tracking turned on, which is how we would collect the data for the teachers to share with the parents at the end of the day.

The Final Product

In the end I designed an app with a lot of functionalities. The thing the app could do were:

Teachers

• 1. Class admin for teachers
• 2. Track class activity
• 3. List ski chool events and activities
• 4. Share images

Parents

• 1. Show what their kid(s) had done that day
• 2. Show what level slopes they can do with their kids
• 3. Display and download shared images
• 4. Show where their kid had been on a local map

Person who found a lost child

• 1. Get the teachers data
• 2. Get quick links to both the school and medical assistance

The functionality for the people who would find a lost child was done on a separate web page, so they wouldn't be forced to download some app on the top of a mountain.

The amount of things the app could do in the end was a bit crazy, and the whole idea that started it all felt abandoned. I however tried the best I could with the wishes of the owners.

Recommendations

I would recommend for the team to bring the finalized project to actual ski-school to see if this is something they would be interested in, and have them give input about what they would like to see implemented.

Reflection
(5 years later)

Now that I have some experience I look back at the naivety I displayed in this project. I was waylaid by the students who started this project, and excluded from meetings they had with the dev team and other potential stakeholder.

Besides that I was also not that good at interviewing, and should have tested without asking directly what the testers thought of the project.

I also feel that I should have taken more leadership at certain points, where, during some interviews, we drifted away from our main objective whenever people suggested additional features.

Looking back on the entire project my main takeaways would be to stand up for myself more, to take more leadership/ownership when outside forces are trying to influence the project and to ask more important and better questions during interviewing.