Project Background

Every year, the City of Brantford relies on dedicated volunteers to flood and maintain 20 public skating rinks across its many neighbourhoods. The city approached us with concerns regarding the continuing feasibility of the program; their efforts in recent years have been hampered by lack of manpower as older volunteers aged out. Through hands-on research we determined that the trouble recruiting younger volunteers was due to poor promotion and an overall sense of dissatisfaction with the outdated, inefficient operation of the rink program.

As the project had a strict timeline of four months, we decided to focus our efforts specifically on improving the volunteer experience. Our problem statement became:

“How might we streamline the flooding and reporting process for rink maintenance volunteers?”

An image of the paper forms used by rink volunteers

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Research

Immersive Research: Understanding the workflow

We began by putting ourselves in the users’ boots. I prefer hands-on research when possible since it provides context and detail that no other method can. In this case, participating in the flooding of several rinks was an obvious route since the rinks were nearby and it also allowed us to interview volunteers in their usual environment.

User Interviews: Understanding the volunteers

I used our visits to the rinks as an opportunity to informally interview volunteers as we helped them flood. My team and I also sat down with office staff responsible for collecting and digitizing the log forms, and the community operations coordinator.

These were the major takeaways:

Daily Log Sheets and maintenance requests were recorded in paper booklets stored at the rink.

Volunteers complained frequently about the outdated, inconvenient paper forms. Many of them loved helping their community but dreaded filling out the paperwork. This is because:

Water + Paper + Cold = a bad experience.

Nobody wants to take off their gloves and use a frozen pen in sub-zero weather. Frozen ink, wet paper and minor frostbite were all issues we observed. It was also impossible for volunteers to take paperwork home as there was no set pickup date to return it by. As a result:

Daily Log Sheets were often left _________.

This is a serious issue not only for the consistency of the city’s internal records, but safety reasons as well. Maintenance requests were often left unwritten or unheard. In one case, a rink that was recently flooded with thin, un-skate-able ice was still marked as Open on the city website simply because nobody had bothered to update the forms.

It was impossible for citizens to find up-to-date information on the status of their local rink.

In the rare cases that forms were filled out consistently and correctly, there was still no set schedule for determining when they would be picked up by the city office and manually digitized. Thanks to Canada’s volatile weather, this meant the rink information on brantford.ca was woefully out of date to the point of irrelevance.

Prototyping

The solution? Better forms. Or so we thought. A brainstorming session led us to the conclusion that our new system should have the following qualities:

Weather-resistant
Portable (can be filled out away from the rink)
Quicker and easier to fill out
More flexible, allowing for a greater amount of information

We quickly realized that the solution to all these solutions was a digital system that combined Daily Log Sheets and maintenance requests into a digital form that could be filled out anytime, anywhere. Rink Report was born.

Since mobile devices can collect data including current temperature, date/time and location, the system can significantly simplify the user flow and cut down on time spent filling in redundant data. It also eliminates the need to digitize Log Forms and ensures the city’s database is always up to date.

Outcome

In the end we delivered the City of Brantford a high-fidelity, interactive prototype and a full implementation plan. I presented our project to Brantford stakeholders, Laurier media, fellow UX students and representatives from TD Innovation Labs. Our solution is currently being implemented by a developer and is expected to be deployed by Winter 2020. Based on initial testing the new Rink Report app significantly improved the UX of the rink flooding experience by cutting the time required to fill out forms in half. It introduced additional efficiencies by removing the need to digitize forms and adding features such as the ability to attach images and videos right to maintenance requests.

Reflection

This project was an incredible learning experience for me. As my first major UX project that is actually being implemented as a real-world product, it’s very satisfying to know I have done work that will actually help a community thrive. While we would have liked to do more to increase the promotion of City of Brantford’s volunteer flooder program, our final solution achieved all of the design goals within the limited project scope.

The most significant lesson I learned was the importance of deferring to users. We made a number of design assumptions that turned out to be false once actual users were faced with the prototypes. It’s important to remember that there is only so much you as a designer can do to empathize with your users. Seeking out honest feedback and finding the humility to implement it is crucial to succeed not only in life, but as a UX designer.