Daycare Electronic Notification Board by Abul Polidori.

Challenge and Selection  WICASA requested the creation of an Electronic Notification Board to  besides broadcast emails to a mail list also provide the same notifications on a web page accessible by  the parents and caretakers.

The team (One-man Team, in the case I) saw an opportunity to reframe the request and expand the  scope creating a new form of communication between parents and daycare staff, not only caretakers,  mainly focusing on children daily follow up. An ethnographic research was put in place and a series of  interviews were conducted to gather information from parents, caretakers, and staff about their  technologic savviness, how comfortable they would be to have information about their children on the  web, what kind of info they would like to have from the daycare.

In possession of these data a combination of Visualization (Week 1 - video 6) and Storytelling (Week 2-  video 4) were used to convey that it would be beneficial to broaden the scope. The combination was a  key aspect of the strategy adopted. Visualization was used to get an alignment among the stakeholders,  helping to convey to the different audiences (mainly the staff) all the aspects of the problem and the line  of experimentation that was adopted later in the process. Storytelling gave a seamless description of  what was the pain points and concerns of the key stakeholders and how the solution would be  experienced in a daily basis by parent caretakers, making the data more “digestible”, softening the  learning curve, allowing stakeholders learn from each other and creating empathy across the board.

Application  The team starts by creating a visualization of the original request’s problem domain and environment  just to understand what problem the Municipality wants to solve (because regardless of the solution  and approach taken that specific problem must be solved). It starts by drawing some stick figures of the  stakeholders and the environment they interact with then expand the visualization to include elements  of the request, the Electronic Notification Board, all these based only on information provided by the  requestors.

Then a workshop is booked to present the current understand to the stakeholders, walking through the  steps that the team went through to get to the current visualization and expand the conversation to  unarticulated needs that the team detected and that could be addressed on that engagement, get  feedback and permission to expand the scope, explaining the need for data and how it will support an  informed decision.

After the first workshop the team runs an ethnographic research, interviewing besides the stakeholders,  caretakers, staff, and parents (extended stakeholders group) from different boroughs with different  socio-economics profiles (since it was assumed that this would influence how the technology is  experienced), asking questions like How you experience smartphone in your daily life? How frequently  do you follow up your children’s daycare experience? What information you would like to exchange with  your children caretaker/daycare?

With the new data points the team runs a new workshop with the extended stakeholders group and to  create the visualization of the newly discovered problem domain, which encompassed besides the board

a 2-way communication platform, including a special channel to talk about a parent’s child. The team  covers different scenarios in the same visualization using different personas elicited from the data to  help understanding and give perspective. Each persona is used to tell a story associated to how they  experience/face the problem and 6 groups of 4 participants are assembled to discuss and enable  feedback collection.

In a next step the team and the extended stakeholders group focus on creating on extending the  visualization to describe the candidate solutions/experiments to the learn launch.

During the process 3 facilitators helped the groups to achieve collective agreement and avoid  polarization.

Insight and Approach  What the team learned is personas and storytelling help immensely the visualization tool, mainly to  convey why such persona would use a solution in a way not envisioned by the majority of the  stakeholders, giving meaningful context to a use case.  This is key to get a deeper alignment and once  that is reached unarticulated needs start to come to light seamlessly, enabling good feedback collection  and greater exchange of ideas and better insights. It allows not only the team but all the stakeholders to  understand what is to be in other person(a) shoes.

Having facilitators was also a successful approach that helped mainly the introverted ones to provided  good feedback and their own unarticulated needs (introverted parents are more comfortable using the  electronic means of communication instead of face to face). The facilitators also helped the stakeholders  to not drift away from the original problem and question.

