Kite Studios is a not-for-profit art studio based in London, England. The studio prides itself as offering high quality and accessible learning and development opportunities to everyone. The studio uses art and creative activities to bring diverse people and communities together as a means of nurturing creativity, strengthening communities and tackling barriers to inclusion.
In my time at Arqino we worked on multiple projects for Kite Studios, one of which was called ‘Consent Manager’. The high-level idea of the project was that educators at Kite Studios would be able to remotely access consent information relating to parents or guardians and their dependents. The information would be provided by these parents or guardians at the time that they first booked with Kite Studios. This information is useful at Kite Studios for situations such as medical emergencies.
Early on in the project, myself and the team at Arqino defined some ideal outcomes for ourselves so that we would have a good measure of success at the end of the project. Below are how these ideal outcomes were defined.
With these ideal outcomes defined, we were able to commence with design ideas. This was something that Kite Studios needed, so I spent some time speaking to educators at the studio to understand how best to capture and present this information to them. Once I had gathered a decent amount of informal feedback, I got started with some early design drafts of some ideas that I had.
This project erred more on the service design than product design side of the spectrum, and so there were a few touchpoints - both internal and external - to consider. These included a Wordpress backend for storage of the captured details, a Wordpress frontend for users to capture their data, and a privileged page on the website for educators to access the information. The flow of information is represented below.
I kicked off the design side of the project with the customer-facing frontend solution. I don’t believe this was strictly necessary, but felt it was a good starting point because it would help me to define the dataset that I would be working with at each additional step of the flow. As a starting point, I defined the data that mattered most to Kite Studios. This had been discussed and brewed over in my informal conversations with the educators at Kite Studios. In the end, I decided on a stepped approach to capturing consent. The data to be gathered was defined as follows.
Once I understood the data that I was going to be gathering, I set out to figure out how I would gather it. I worked with a backend developer to decide that users would receive a link via email asking to capture consent. This link would take them directly to the Consent Manager section of their account with Kite Studios. Once they had logged in, they would immediately see the first step of the flow - Child Details. This flow balanced the needs of Kite Studios to have this process operate efficiently, but also to ensure that we held privacy and security to the highest standard possible. By the end of this process, I had defined the visual aspects of the Child Details step of the flow.
Each step largely repeated the step that came before it, and so to keep this interesting, I’ll move on to what happened after that. Keeping with my logical sequencing, once information had been captured it needed to be stored. We were storing this data in a database linked to our Wordpress instance. And so, again, in the interests of simplicity and usability, I designed a table to fit within a Wordpress page and afford our educators the flexibility they needed. The storage and presentation of this data to educators also included some search functionalities.
Finally I came to the access part of the project. This is where educators would access the consent information that was relevant to them. How they would do so is via a public link. Once they accessed the link they were prompted to log in and, once logged in, were presented with a very similar table to the one that they might have been used to seeing in Wordpress if they had access to it. This table afforded them the same search functionality as in Wordpress and made it much easier for them to access the information that was relevant to them.
As part of this project I was able to create a solution that served multiple parties concurrently. Parents or guardians had a simplified way to provide relevant information to Kite Studios and educators at Kite Studios had a simplified way of accessing that information. This created a safe and functional environment where both parents or guardians and educators could fully embrace their respective roles with the express understanding that, in the background, were anything to happen, the necessary steps could be taken confidently.
I worked closely with a developer as part of this project. Between her and I, we effectively became the delivery team, iterating as we went to deliver this project. It was a great opportunity for me to understand and design around technical constraints, while also being cognisant of how that impacted the user experience.