Modernising attendance taking for enhanced efficiency and engagement.
As part of a two-designer team, I led the design process to digitize the school attendance system. By conducting user research and interviewing teachers and volunteers, I identified pain points and workflows that needed improvements. I focused on creating simple, intuitive interfaces that streamlined attendance tracking while ensuring data accuracy and integration with existing school systems. Through continuous testing and iterations, we refined the design, resulting in a user-friendly solution that transformed the attendance process and boosted operational efficiency.
UX Design • UI Design • User research • Prototyping • Usability testing • End-to-end
Figma • Figjam • Notion • Google Workspace
June - Aug 2023
The Society of Starfish is a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering out-of-school youths by offering them a second chance at education. They provide free tuition programs for youths who have been displaced from formal education for various reasons, helping them unlock their full potential and pursue brighter futures. Operated entirely by volunteers, the organization relies on community support to fulfil its mission.
For full-time educators, teaching is already a demanding role, but at the Society of Starfish, volunteer teachers—balancing their jobs with teaching—faced the added challenge of manual attendance tracking. This cumbersome process drained precious teaching time, piling on unnecessary administrative tasks and impacting the quality of education they could provide.
Key challenges included:
1
Redundant Effort: Managing both physical and digital attendance records created unnecessary duplication and double work. This made it difficult to track attendance trends and gain a clear, accurate overview of student attendance.
2
Delayed Support: Teachers had to manually flip through paper attendance records to check student status, lacking real-time data and efficient communication tools, which led to delays in providing timely support to students.
3
Disrupted Productivity: Administrative tasks like attendance logging interrupted the flow of classroom activities, leaving less time for the core task—teaching.
We interviewed all 5 teacher volunteers to gain valuable insights into their challenges and needs. These conversations helped uncover the specific features that would enhance their teaching experience and streamline their workflow.
"Students often come in halfway through the class, so either we disrupt the class and take the attendance or do it later on, but we might forget.
- Shafi, 32, Teacher volunteer
It is a very tedious process to follow up with absentees, because for each one, there are 3 points of contact that we need to follow up with.
- Kamale, 27, Teaching coordinator
Students need to meet 75% attendance each term, and it is very tedious to manually transfer and tabulate this at the end of each term.
- Aqila, 33, Teacher volunteer
With these challenges in mind, we asked... How Might We
The goal was clear—design an efficient, user-friendly attendance system that reduces administrative burden, streamlines follow-ups, and allows teachers to focus on delivering quality education—ultimately leading to a smoother more productive classroom experience.
Based on the insights gathered from user interviews, I crafted a detailed user persona that encapsulated the teachers’ core needs, behaviors, and pain points. This persona became a guiding reference throughout the design process.
Mapping the volunteer teaching experience highlighted key pain points. Teachers struggled with manual tasks such as printing and filing attendance sheets, often missing latecomers or causing disruptions to the lessons. With limited staff, the process became chaotic, and tracking absentees or transferring data into digital systems was time-consuming and error-prone.
These challenges revealed an opportunity to design a more seamless digital attendance system that would reduce disruptions:
✔ Eliminate manual attendance-taking, reducing prep work and classroom distractions, enabling teachers to dedicate more time to teaching and student engagement.
✔ Streamline data access and transfer, enabling teachers to easily track attendance trends over time, generate reports, and quickly identify issues with student attendance.
✔ Automated absentee notifications to ensure timely follow-ups with parents and social workers.
✔ Error reduction by minimizing errors associated with manual data entry and transfer.
After understanding the teachers' needs and challenges, we prioritized the P1: Must-Have Features that would provide the most significant user impact with minimal development effort. By concentrating on these critical features, we ensured that the solution would quickly address pain points, allowing teachers to see immediate improvements in their workflow.
Next, we mapped out the user flows to visualize how teachers would navigate the system and accomplish each task. This allowed us to identify the most intuitive and efficient paths, ensuring a smooth, streamlined experience for users at every step.
With these insights in hand, I began sketching and ideating potential solutions, focusing on the key pain points identified earlier. I created initial layouts to visualize the direction, ensuring the designs addressed both user needs and project goals. Early feedback from stakeholders was crucial in refining the design, ensuring alignment with the broader vision while maintaining user-centric principles.
At this stage, we conducted two rounds of testing to validate that the mid-fidelity designs met user expectations before moving to high-fidelity prototypes. We explored different variations for each page, experimenting with various interaction styles and user interfaces to determine which options were the most intuitive and user-friendly for teachers.
Teachers preferred Option 2 for its ability to present key information at a glance, making it easier to navigate. The use of labeled buttons was particularly well-received, as they provided clear and straightforward interactions, minimizing confusion and streamlining the user experience.
Once the design variations were finalized, we conducted a final round of usability testing and interviews to evaluate the user experience across five key task flows: 1) taking attendance, 2) reaching out to latecomers and absentees, 3) editing student records, 4) updating attendance records, and 5) exporting attendance data.
While a few areas required further refinement, the overall feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Users successfully completed 100% of the tasks, confirming that the design was intuitive and met their core needs. A major takeaway was the suggestion to add a search function and filter criteria, which would enhance data management and streamline the process.
This testing phase provided crucial validation for our design choices, ensuring the final solution would effectively support teachers in their daily routines and significantly improve workflow efficiency.
* Only a few key screens are shown—no need to overwhelm you with a digital jungle! :)
Understanding the pressures teachers face, we designed a digital solution that not only simplified attendance tracking but also streamlined communication—freeing up valuable time for teaching and reducing the administrative burden.
✔
Instant Monitoring—Teachers could instantly identify absentees and receive real-time updates, eliminating the need for manual logs.
✔
Effortless Tracking—The solution simplified attendance management by enabling easy tracking of student attendance and generating detailed reports, empowering teachers to make data-driven decisions and address the individual needs of each student.
✔
Streamlined Communication—API integration enabled seamless communication with students, parents, and social workers, ensuring alignment and timely actions.
What started as a solution to lighten teachers’ administrative load quickly evolved into a tool that elevated the entire teaching experience.
✔
Time saved—By eliminating manual attendance-taking, filing, and transferring attendance data, teachers saved an average of 30 minutes per day. This time-saving allowed them to focus more on engaging with students, planning lessons, and fostering a more impactful learning environment
