Building for the less tech-savvy
Introduction
School buses — a common mode of transportation for Singaporean students to commute to-and-from school. In present day Singapore, many daily school bus processes like attendance taking tend to be manual and done using pen-and-paper, leading to potential human errors or lapses. To improve these processes, the ESTL team built the experimental product OneSchoolBus (OSB), a software solution which seeks to make school transportation safer and smarter. In working towards this goal, the team studied the school bus scene in Singapore and brainstormed on how to contribute to it. This study led to the proposal to digitalise this attendance taking process using a mobile-friendly web application. This would enable attendance taking to be a much quicker process, where the attendance information would be easily disseminated between the parties involved — schools, operator, parents etc.
Challenges
On our journey to digitalisation, the team encountered two main challenges:
- Most bus drivers and attendants tend to be older and less tech savvy. They were averse to digital solutions due to the steep learning curve involved. If attendance taking were to be digitalised, this would be the target user group that the team would need to design and build our digital solution for.
- The lack of motivation by bus companies, drivers, and attendants to digitalise. For them, there was skepticism to digitalise a process which in their view, has worked sufficiently well for their needs. To ensure the organic take-up of our solution, these groups would need to be convinced by the value that our solution brings.
Solutions
To address these challenges, the team refined our designs iteratively by speaking with bus companies, drivers, and attendants on key designs and features. This led us to arrive at two guiding principles for our application:
- Simplicity and Accessibility
- Be clear about the value we bring to our end users
Simplicity and Accessibility
“Meet where your users are, not where you want them to be at”
The quote above was a relevant guiding principle for our product. To ease our users into our digital solution, we interviewed bus drivers and attendants at multiple junctures to ensure that our designs remained intuitive to them. By going down to the primary schools and speaking to bus operators and attendants, the team gleaned insights into improving our designs, simplifying our application through multiple iterations until the current version below.
For example, in earlier iterations, the team contemplated displaying the progress of a bus along a route (middle screen). However, the drivers gave feedback that was something too complicated for them to operate due to the need for user input while driving. With this feedback in mind, the team decided to drop that proposed feature. Instead, the team chose to simplify the daily task of attendance-taking — making our hit-areas extra large, colour coding key design elements, and providing a “Mark All” button to quickly take attendance (rightmost screen). These design decisions were complemented by making conscious choices to offload the more “difficult” parts of the application, like assigning drivers to routes, to the bus company back-office staff — people who are traditionally more comfortable with handling digital administrative work. This decision involves building an administrative portal for them which will be covered in the future.
This simplicity is complemented by increasing the accessibility of application — supporting multiple languages, using SMS OTPs instead of passwords to reduce mental load on the drivers/attendants.
Be clear about the value proposition
“Be focused on outcomes, not outputs”
Digitalisation is not an easy pill to swallow. To allay the skepticism that bus operators might have about our digital solution, the team had to be clear on the value-add of every feature. We had to focus on the outcomes that digitalisation brings, rather than just the output of digitalisation — “digitalising for the sake of digitalisation”. On our attendance taking app, one such value proposition is to reduce the paperwork that drivers/attendants have to carry around. We chose to display the phone numbers of the students on the app, allowing drivers and attendants a quick way to contact their parents in the event they are absent. Our users found immediate value with this feature — gone are the days where drivers/attendants would carry around a sheets of paper with their student details on them, scrambling to figure out how to call the child’s parents when they are absent at the bus stop. By being clear about the use cases and value-add, the team was able to convince operators, drivers, and attendants to adopt the digital solution, improving our daily active users metric.
Results
These decisions were actively re-iterated upon during our pilots with schools, eventually achieving a >90% daily usage rate of our application for attendance taking.
Looking ahead
As an agile development team, the OSB team is constantly looking to improve our application. After gathering additional feedback, we are looking to explore a more “hands-free” approach to attendance taking using NFC stickers/tokens. Beyond building features, the next milestone for the team would be to scale up our adoption rate of our application to make school transportation safer and smarter.
Want to find out more about ESTL and the products we build? Contact us at hello@estl.edu.sg to find out more!
