Take Shift Android Application

INTRODUCTION

Our Motivation

For our day to day activities such as going out of the campus after our identification cards were being scanned, collecting couriers, making hostel complaints etc. we were in constant touch with the security guards and in some way we became the part of their daily life. We all shared a lot of things with each other like how life is going, whether they had lunch or not. Later on we came around a situation where a security guard was facing problem for getting a leave so that he could attend his family problems. He was in so much tension that we asked him the reason behind this and he said he was waiting for leave which he filed three days back and got no response from the security organization which outsource security guards to different organizations after doing a strict profiling. On asking why don’t you take help from other guards and in his response he said he don’t know who can takes his position before the sanctioning of leave as no information regarding the schedule of guards were made available to them.

In order to find the answers or if possible to build a solution which could help them we decided to take it as a research topic.

We choose IIITB as a field of study and conducted interviews of security guards of IIITB.For further procedure we followed Questionnaire and Observation.Conducted interview of both male and female security guards for holistic information regarding the their daily lives and problems.

Ux Process and methodology followed during this Project

User Research

Open ended interview questions were asked to the six participants with an average time of ten minutes after taking their consent. Participant’s inputs were recorded through video recordings and written notes.

Difficulties faced while conducting interviews

• Time factor: It was difficult to get time from guards as they were busy with their own activities.
• Guards were bit hesitant in giving the complete details in the first shot, fearing any kind of action from the management.

Methodology

The research methodology we have chosen is thematic analysis. Thematic analysis method is generally used for identifying and analyzing patterns within the data. The reason behind choosing the thematic analysis method is, we were looking in identifying patterned meaning across the dataset and to deduce the codes into different themes and analyzing the findings.We used the process of coding for developing themes from our data.Initially after the interviews were over, we started with the transcription. Once the transcription was over, we began deducting codes from the transcripts .The factors which were majorly working and not working for the system and conflicting views between the organization and security guards.

FINDINGS FROM INTERVIEW

• Difficult to maintain their work life balance.
• More Work & Less Salary (They works for 12 hours but salary is only 17,000).
• Sometimes on last day of the week they have to work for 24 hours due to shift change.
• Difficult to get leave, apply one week before to get leave.

Sample persona

Sample Scenario

It was Monday morning; Sujeet got a call from his wife telling him about the illness of his mother. The family asked Sujeet to come home as soon as possible as his mother needs to be hospitalized.He is craving to go home but he has to wait for atleast three days in order to get his leave sanctioned from the company for which he is working.Therefore he started asking help from his fellow colleagues for which he has to call and visit them again and again.

Storyboard

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Before the starting developing our low and high fidelity prototypes we conducted a design workshop of one hour through which awareness was provided to the participant through scenarios and story-boards and later on their feedback was recorded for our initial low fidelity design. Here in order to make this post short we will be only talking about the final design of the prototype and the problems faced and the choices taken.

Prototype Designing

During the evaluation of our low fidelity wireframes one of the valuable response that we got from our participants was the problem with the registration process. One of the participant shared his concern about applications asking for too much details for registration without any prior notification which most of the time he finds cumbersome and is forced to exit the app. Based on his response we used minimalist design principle in order to make the registration process simple and easy. Before starting the registration process the participant will notified about the important documents i.e required for the registration process as shown below in the image agllary. We divided the whole registration process in two parts not asking for too much information at the same time. The first part includes the general information about the participant such as job id, Full name , Dob etc. along the uploading of the document that verifies this information. The next phase includes the filing up of the address details along with the uploading of the document that will be used to verify the details filled by the participant.

Images below represents the sequence of events during the Phase-I of the registration process.

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Images below represents the sequence of events during the Phase-II of the registration process.

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In phase-II of the registration process we have provided the option of skipping the step (providing the address details) just for the user convenience and they can provide these details later on.They will see an incomplete profile message when they click on their profiles.They will be able to post on this app and also will be able to accept the shifts and create event once they have provided all the details.But they can see the posts by the other persons.After the completion of the registration process the user will be required to login into the app using his job id and the password created. Once he has logged into the application he will see the below given screen where he can see the posts created by the other security guards who required help.

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Search Icon

Users by using the search icon can easily find the specific posts and events that has been posted by an individual.This helps them to easily find that information which they are looking for.

Three dotted Icon

Idea behind creating this icon was to provide an easy navigation to the functionalities that this app provides to its user in the simplistic manner.When the user clicks this icon he will have three different options to select from “Ask for Help”, “Create Event”, “Settings”.

Ask for help

One of the important information that we obtained during our research work was that sometimes our users used social media platforms such as Whatsapp in order to ask for help during emergency situation.One of the major problem that they faced was providing all the details such as shift number, shift location, duration of shift etc in form of message which they find it very difficult to draft in the form of message. Therefore we decided to design the form and we have designed the form in such a way through which the users can easily draft the post in minimal amount of time not forgetting about the important details. The other problem which they faced was that most of the times their post on social media platforms gets lost because of lots of information coming at the same time due to which they have to repost the information again and again.This was one of the major reasons to come up with this application.

The biggest hurdle which we faced during the designing phase of the project was How to represent the information given by the user through ‘ask for help form’ in the form of post in minimal amount of space on the screen and at the same time providing all the details.Therefore we have come up with the below given design which includes all the information provided by the user efficiently in a limited screen space. The number enclosed in a circle represents the shift number which the seeker of the help is currently working on and wants someone else to take it in case of emergency.There are total of three shifts each of 8 hours within a single day taken by the different security guards for a single location. After every 8 hours the person taking care of the particular location changes.

Purpose of the share icon

There can be a situation when a user who is looking at the post might not be able to help the user seeking help but he knows someone who can help therefore we have provided an easy option in this situation to share the post with their friends and colleagues through different channels which suits an individual.

Accept Button

On clicking the accept button the user will see the notification popup screen asking him to confirm that he wants to accept the shift posted by the help seeker.After the user confirms that a text message will be sent to the registered number of the help seeker.In case the same number is linked with the whatsapp of the either parties text message will also be sent to the registered number.Also the post which the user has accepted will be pinned down to the “Your shifts art-board” along with the update button option through which the user can modify his choice based on his/her decision. As soon as the user modifies his choice the text and whatsapp message again will be sent to the help seeker.

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Create Event

In order to aware the security guards in relation to happenings around the campus and upcoming events we have provided an additional functionality. Also by providing the information of the upcoming events this app helps them realize their workload in upcoming days and if required they can plan their pending (family issues, bills etc) work accordingly.

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Settings

By clicking on this Icon the user of the application can make changes to his/her profile such as uploading profile photo , changing phone number. He/she cannot make changes to his/her job id as it uniquely identifies them. We have also provided the toggle button option asking the user whether they to be notified about new posts by the other users. If turned on the user will be notified via sms and also by whatsapp if his number is active on whatsapp. The idea behind using sms is to provide information to user irrespective of their access to internet and also this is the reason for making the phone number as a mandatory field during the registration process.

Testing and Evaluation

We used usability testing and think-aloud method in order to test our prototypes regularly and incorporated the results obtained in our prototypes.

Conclusion

While a fully developed product could further inform the benefits of this application and how it can best support security guards , the findings emerging from this study confirm that when made available, a strong majority of participants with improved version of this platform will use this system as a tool to ask help from their fellow colleagues whenever they are in need and ask someone to take their shifts.

Future work

TakeShift application till now has been designed considering only the needs and requirements of the security guards at IIIT-b campus and in our prototype during the registration process we considered only one company and asked the job id for that company which employs our users on contract basis. We can generalize this concept by adding drop down column of different organizations providing security services and also location wise filtering followed by asking the job id of that company.Our help out section and events section will only show the information about the organization which has been selected by our users through filtering during the registration process.