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Soccer Dad is a father of 4 children. All of his kids are in school, they all participate His children participated in different activities and have very different schedules, though three of the four played soccer for both club and high school teams. His wife is in charge of keeping all of the schedules updated but he helps, which requires gathering information off the school website, or from school handouts, and usually also involves contacting the other parents of other students to make sure that no event is glossed over.
He is usually not the parent in charge of the kid’s children's schedule, but he is always helping to make sure that they are where they need to be at the right times by either ferrying them around himself or organizing rides for them, be it coordinating with the mother to pick them up/drop them off or arranging with other parents to take a group of kids around. Organizing things with other parents can prove difficult, because it’s hard to know which parents to contact as their availability will naturally be based on their kid’s schedule. Even if something is arranged, sometimes they need to be reminded of their responsibilities.
This Dad is technologically savvy, keeping digital calendars with all of his kids’ children’s schedules, and has an address book with all of the containing other parents and viable helpers. He also began to use email more as it became popular, although now that his children can drive, he no longer needs to contact other parents for help.
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User Classes
Parents
Parents will be the most common user class, and are responsible for organizing the schedules for the entire family and driving kids to a from activities. Parents may contact other parents if they need help getting their children to or from an activity. This class could include both power users (parents with many children that often need to contact other parents for help) and novice users (parents with few children that don't often contact other parents for help but still need to organize their schedules).
Activity Organizers
The activity organizers are responsible for creating and distributing the activity schedules to parents.
Children
Children are usually not involved in planning, but they are responsible for knowing their own schedule each day and who will be driving them to and from activities.
Needs and Goals
We recognize that scheduling can be a very general problem, so we will focus our design on meeting the needs and goals of our user classes:
Parent:
- Keep track of all of the kids’ schedules.
- Be able to easily update these schedules as needed.
- Be able to share the schedules with others to assist carpool planning.
- Keep track of friend parents in the system.
- Be able to easily contact other parents.
- Confirm plans with other parents ahead of time, and at the time of a scheduled event.
- Emphasize non-repeating events because users easily recall repeated events.
- Maintain privacy with select events when desired.
Event Organizer:
- Easily create and distribute schedules.
- Reach out to all parents using a calendar to communicate changes.
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- View calendar.
- Know who is going to be driving them to and from activities for the day.
- When older, children may want to update their own schedule.
- If old enough to drive, a child can help parents with driving, and so will need to closely communicate with parents.