Butterfly
School Social Work Application
UX Designer and Researcher
User research, wireframing, prototyping, usability testingButterfly Social Work App
Butterfly is a school social work central work tool
to track the social and emotional progress of student clients. It gives social workers a central space to quickly see all case notes and goals of students. It also makes it easy to connect to IEP systems and input data from sessions.
Overview
School social workers have no central place to efficiently keep case notes, track S&E data, and have access to all the students’ information in one place.
Create an application that helps school social workers do their jobs more efficiently. Make a central application that has all student data at their fingertips. An application that can be used on the go, in sessions or during emergencies.
Goal
User Research
I have many contacts in the social work field across the country. I kept hearing some of the same issues surface about their jobs. I posed quick questions to a sample of people in the industry. Through these questions, I developed more focused questions that became my interview questions. The main pain points that seemed to be universal were being understaffed, cumbersome systems to capture case notes, unreliable data collection about students, no mobile application to have as a mobile solution during crisis intervention, and just overall burnout. Through the research, it seemed that there was agreement that a more efficient application would benefit the achievement of social and emotional development goals.
Understaffed
Clunky antiquated systems to capture student data
Unreliable data
collection
for students
No mobile application to use during crisis intervention
burnout
Pain Points
Persona
I compiled the responses of all my participants at the interview stage and created groups of similar responses or pain points. I also put together similar expectations that different interviewees had. I then averaged the age of the interviewees and constructed a persona to give an entity to this data. I ended up creating two personas since the gap in pain points really depended on experience in the profession. If I were to focus on one person who is seasoned and another who is young, I would be able to get a better perspective on developing the application.
Samantha
“I feel like a firefighter. You never know what emergency will happen each day. I want to help guide my students and let them see the bigger picture
of life. It’s hard when you are a small team with so many students.”
Bio
Age: 37
Education: Masters Degree, LCSW
Hometown: Chicago
Family: Single
Occupation: School Social Worker
Samantha is a social worker at a city high school with 3000 students. Her caseload ranges from 60 to 90 students. There are many students with IEPs. Additionally, she works with the general student population. She primarily focuses on students with IEP minutes and setting up times for Gen Ed students who come in for help. She dislikes using her phone or computer during sessions. A note-taking application would be useful for quickly jotting down notes and keeping them in a student's file. The notes could even be as simple as clicking a quick term for later reporting. To track students' behavior, she needs to collect data from teachers, but the system teachers use is cumbersome. She has to put her case notes into a very time-consuming system. It is difficult to remember the goals for each student because they are buried in the state application for reporting IEPs. Her ideal would be to have a centralized application where all the information about the students and the sessions is stored. It would be able to pull reports and show progress if it was all together.
Goals
Frustrations
Would be helpful to have an application that centralizes all data and notes for the student working with the social worker.
Quick way to manage case notes and keep student goals quickly viewable.
An easy way to track data that doesn’t lake time away from teachers or social working staff.
Writing IEP case notes is time-consuming. plus it’s not easy since the system is very clunky with drop-downs and click-throughs.
Hard to track data because teachers don’t fill out cumbersome behavioral logs.
No centralized way to keep all notes for students in one place.
Problem statement
Samantha is a social worker who needs a way to digitally put all info regarding a student’s case notes in a centralized area because it is easier to pull information to submit case notes if all the notes that
are connected to the child are easy to bring up on a browser or mobile application.
Persona
Susan
“Sometimes it’s overwhelming because it’s just us and everyone is coming to us when they could handle it on their own. Not everything is an emergency.”
Bio
Age: 24
Education: Masters Degree
Hometown: Chicago
Family: Single
Occupation: School Social Worker
Susan works as a social worker in a city high school of 1600 students. She has a caseload of 30 - 60 students. Many of them also have IEPs that require social work minutes by state law. She also has the general student population she has to work with outside of her state mandatory minutes.
She has to track student behaviors and intervene in conflicts and other issues that come up daily. It is hard to keep up with all the fire drills in the student body. Some issues can be handled by the teachers and not all issues need to go to the social work team. She still wants to give support when needed. She wishes she could use her mobile phone more to communicate with teams in real-time when issues arise. She also would love to be able to have an easy way for teachers to track behaviors in and out of class so that the social work team can intervene before problems manifest themselves. writing case notes takes a lot of time so she needs a central place to put notes and follow students so that data is all in one location. She just needs some support to limit redundancy and optimize communications among staff.
Goals
Frustrations
Would love a mobile application that I could use since I’m always on the go.
A quick way to manage case notes and keep student goals quickly viewable.
An easy way to track data that doesn’t take time away from teachers or social working staff.
Writing progress and case notes
is very time-consuming.An easier way to track behavioral data about students in class and around the school.
A central way for school teams to communicate quickly at one time instead
of emails and walkie-talkies.
Susan is a social worker who needs a mobile way to quickly communicate information with specific staff during a student emergency. Many times social workers are the last ones to know what is going on. However, they are the main people who can give guidance to staff in dealing with the student crisis.
Problem statement
Continuing with my research I did a competitive audit of different products out in the market for student management or school LMS applications. I was able to gain insights on areas where the Butterfly application could fill in missing support functions for school social workers.
Competitive audit
After the research I was ready to take what I learned and start applying ideas to paper. I started sketching out how the application could be laid out for the most efficient flow for the end-user, social workers.
Ideation
I pulled the different elements from my sketches and started building out digital wireframes. I focused on how to take the important needs of the buy school social worker and put them into a focused tool stripped down to what is needed without a lot of graphic noise.
Digital wireframes
Big buttons that bring you to a specific categories quickly
To help accessibility and speed, notes and navigation can be done with voice control.
I took the digital wireframes and started linking them into a low-fidelity prototype. Once put together I set up a usability study to see how the user
flow works in getting from the main homepage to setting up case notes
and saving them.
Low-fidelity prototype
Click on image to view low-fidelity prototype
To get some insight on the flow function of the low-fidelity prototype I conducted a usability study.
Usability Study
Participants wanted an easier way to navigate in the case notes section.
Participants wanted a more straightforward way for student search.
Participants wanted to have a focused student page of options.
Case notes
Student search
Student page
Based on the feedback from the usability study I updated the design for the case note section. Instead of accordion drop-downs each section has its own page. It’s easier for the user to move around in the case notes following large buttons instead of smaller drop-down arrows.
High-fidelity Mockups
Before usability studyafter usability studyThe feedback from the usability study was that during an emergency there shouldn’t be a lot of buttons to think about while using the app. Especially when time is critical. To adjust for this issue the alert process by having just the main emergency categories available. The contacts would be already set up when adding a child to the social workers’ caseloads or a generic contact list for students not using social work services.
High-fidelity Mockups
Before usability studyafter usability studyHigh-fidelity Mockups
The layout was updated based on the usability study. I also tweaked some design issues that I saw as I started linking the mockups together.
High-fidelity prototype
Click on the image to view the low-fidelity prototype
Accessibility considerations
Focused on having simply buttons that are large and easy to read.
Keep the design simple very utilitarian in nature. Each section is easy to navigate.
Have voice dictation that could be used to fill out notes, forms, search and navigation functions.
Since the social workers would be using different digital screens based
on their way of working. I needed
to make a browser-based site that
was responsive and similar to
the dedicated application.
I started building the responsive design website after finishing the dedicated application. I referenced the initial site map made for the app and built the responsive design site map based on that. The goal was to keep it working seamlessly across screens.
Responsive design - Site map
Rebuilt the application into a browser-based site that would work on different screen scenarios. I focused on making the navigation move you through the case notes section. I would build out the rest of the browser site
at a later date.
Responsive design - wireframes
wireframe - desktop
wireframe - mobile
wireframe - tablet
I then built out low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes.
Responsive design - prototypes
Click on the image below to view the low-fidelity prototype
Click on the image below to view the high-fidelity prototype
Thoughts on the project…
Users felt that the application addressed their key pain points with case note development, management of information for session review, and report analysis. The ease of use by the users made them express, quote, “ I wish I had this application 10 yrs ago.”
I have learned about the high-stakes environments in which school social workers work while trying to help the social and emotional development of adolescent youth. Managing long-term counseling sessions, IEP minutes, and crisis management bring with them a plethora of issues for the school social worker. Understanding what these amazing practitioners of youth development do on a given day really helped me focus on solutions to solve the daily pain points they face in their profession.
Impact
Insights
Thoughts on the project…
I would like to do more in-depth trials in an educational setting. School social
workers should work with
the application for a
longer period of time to
determine what works
and what needs
to be adjusted.
I would like to make sure
the application works seamlessly with the school district's or school's existing systems. This is a tool for social workers and could be extended to work with teachers, so the application should sync with already existing data and processes.
I could see the application being built into a functional tool that could be used by students. While social workers are in sessions building goals and doing work, the application could have a student version. The goals and tasks they could follow to reach those social and emotional goals would be available in this version.