Northstar
Child Safety Platform
About the project
With security becoming the biggest concern among everyone – parents and schools in particular want to ensure the safety of their children when they leave home for school and till the time they return home. A Bus monitoring and security system is the need of the hour.
The Challenge
1. Parents to know, what time the child boarded the bus, or descend from? How can the schools reliably monitor the drivers and the attenders? The solution has to meet all the technical requirements with support for any future enhancements.
2. Parents with more than one child studying at different schools or the same school.
3. Most of the married women users (homemakers) are not tech savvy, and have less time in preparing children for school
4. Working parents should be notified about trips without accessing the app
5. Contacting School Admin in case of emergencies
6. Help setup flexible alert zones for pick up and drop
7. Reduce overall costs on the fuel and driver expenses as they produce fake bills (Third party services)
School admins to have the entire Software Solution, a Monitoring system for school kids in Transit. The Software was developed from scratch and interfaces with the Hardware developed by a partner IT Company. The goal is to provide a user friendly interface for schools and parents to be able to monitor their children.
Features & Functionalities
For Schools
• Student Safety with Video, Intercom, and real-time locating
• Student Safety with Video, Intercom, and real-time locating
• Behaviour monitoring of bus drivers with rating
• Optimise Routes and save transit time and cost
• Monitor Speed real-time on a dashboard with crash alerts
• Various reports available to monitor route, speed violations
• Optimise Routes and save transit time and cost
• Monitor Speed real-time on a dashboard with crash alerts
• Various reports available to monitor route, speed violations
For Parents
• Expected Time of Arrival (ETA) Alerts to parents when bus is few minutes away from their stop
• Android/ iOS Application available to know real time location of Bus & to contact school admin in case of emergencies
• Set flexible alert zones and mute notifications when not needed
• Add multiple parent access and Multiple children tracking
• Expected Time of Arrival (ETA) Alerts to parents when bus is few minutes away from their stop
• Android/ iOS Application available to know real time location of Bus & to contact school admin in case of emergencies
• Set flexible alert zones and mute notifications when not needed
• Add multiple parent access and Multiple children tracking
For Northstar Operations
• Ability to configure Routes as per bus routes
• Route Optimisations by plotting
• Customise Stops and students
• Monitor in live map or on status dashboard
• Review reports like Distance, Over-speed, Route Violation, Driver Merit Analysis
• Ability to configure Routes as per bus routes
• Route Optimisations by plotting
• Customise Stops and students
• Monitor in live map or on status dashboard
• Review reports like Distance, Over-speed, Route Violation, Driver Merit Analysis
UX Design Process
Apart from Quantitative research & Qualitative research I have also used some design research techniques to arrive at a design solution. Observation and understanding of the objectives were necessary in order to use the insights to design and analyse, to be presented to a larger team. This process helped in making recommendations.
Created personas or scenarios, describing mental models of the user, to understand the user behaviour in response to the product. We tried some one-on-one interviews, surveys and questionnaires with users or stakeholders. These Q & A helped as we were looking to compare and contrast answers from various users. Card Sorts, usability tests, tree Tests and A/B tests are some other methods we used in observing the behaviour to determine the usability of the product.
The Solution
Caters to Bus Tracking, Child Monitoring, Video Surveillance, Driver Analysis and Attendance Management- all in one single platform. We leveraged GPS, RFID and Video Surveillance technology to provide a safe environment for kids to grow.
A Mobile App for Parents to track & receive voice notifications and a handheld device friendly/ web app User Interface for Schools. The solution comprises of the Web Application and necessary backend data store, and is capable of:
1. Tracking the bus in real time using satellite based GPS. See useful information on the route such as stops and traffic
2. Providing useful real time alerts to the parents and the school admin person. For e.g. when the child / boards the bus, descends from it. To know when the bus is nearing the pick-up point so that the child doesn’t have to wait, in the case of any unforeseen delays. On the same lines, to know the ETA in unpredictable traffic is an obvious advantage
3. Settings / default configuration should be easily changeable. For e.g.: a parent may wish, to not receive alerts
4. Schools can set up routes, stops. Assign students to bus. In addition can send out bulk SMSs
5. Different roles and corresponding access rights depending on who logs in (all, parent, school admin)
6. Support audio/visual monitoring.
1. Tracking the bus in real time using satellite based GPS. See useful information on the route such as stops and traffic
2. Providing useful real time alerts to the parents and the school admin person. For e.g. when the child / boards the bus, descends from it. To know when the bus is nearing the pick-up point so that the child doesn’t have to wait, in the case of any unforeseen delays. On the same lines, to know the ETA in unpredictable traffic is an obvious advantage
3. Settings / default configuration should be easily changeable. For e.g.: a parent may wish, to not receive alerts
4. Schools can set up routes, stops. Assign students to bus. In addition can send out bulk SMSs
5. Different roles and corresponding access rights depending on who logs in (all, parent, school admin)
6. Support audio/visual monitoring.
Design - Robustness, Comfortable & Well designed
I'm using Google's Material Design philosophy that defines every item of an interface to have the physical form of a piece of paper. Using its principles specially when it came to UX guidelines and graphic icon usage to better suit my user group. I defined the colour palette based on colour that the parents and school admins use everyday for a simplified system
Wireframe, Sketching & Paper Prototyping
I used these techniques to outline user flow, explore variety of layouts and show the basic app structure.
After shaping the idea on paper and structuring it in mind, I used Illustrator and sketch to draw the UX. Depending on the task, the first explorations could be shown to the stakeholders in hand-drawn sketches or digital wireframes.
Designing UI flows
I made the flows of individual interactions, making it an ongoing conversation.
Generate Mobile app Strings
I made a common strings text file for both Android and iOS, for the uniformity of the texts used throughout the app. To generate these .XML and .strings file, I used a File extractor .JAR tool with slight modifications to fit my requirements to get the required output in different formats for both Android and iOS.
Testing, Prototyping & Validation
To communicate my vision with my ideas and give a clarity to the stakeholders I prototyped the layouts. I understood that designing for target market means, making an investment in understanding how users will react to the my layouts. I validated my directions for feedback with my team members and users. This revealed a perspective into the details that I had not comprehended before. It brought forward many intricate problems with designing the interactions. I used Adobe Illustrator to create mockups and lastly, animation was added to show how the elements interact with each other and to represent the live view with tools like Adobe Xd or Framer to test usability & interactions.
Design for iOS
To maximise impact and reach to all users, I redesigned the app with same quality and functionality.
Thank you for viewing
