Cover: Create social normalcy and find coverage for your kids by creating a COVID bubble!

Clint Pells: Chief Information Officer, Parent in Residence

Clara Xue: Chief Research Officer, Ideator

Luke LeVasseur: Chief Meeting Facilitator, Wifi Support Patient

Problem and Solution Overview

Coronavirus has unrecognizably changed the way we live over the course of 2020. As people around the world were forced to abandon their traditional social lives and shared spaces, work (and school) from home became the norm, resulting in a new class of problems for parents. Balancing work and childcare while at home is a taxing game to play, and the desire to return to social normalcy makes it hard for parents to recover emotionally. Our application, Cover, allows parents to distribute this balancing act amongst friends by facilitating the formation of a social COVID Bubble.

COVID Bubbles, popularized by the NBA, are a group of individuals (families in our case) who pledge to adhere to a certain set of shared COVID risk management rules. This shared responsibility allows them to isolate as a pod, making in-person interaction possible while maintaining COVID safety. Our application will help users establish and agree upon bubble rules. From there, Cover’s cross-family scheduling interface allows families to input their schedules at an individual level, find times of conflict (e.g when the child is free/needs attention, but parents cannot give it), and request coverage from other adults within the bubble.

Paper Prototype, Testing Process, and Results

Since Cover is designed to be a mobile app, we sketched our two main tasks (establishing a bubble team and childcare scheduling) within a mobile size layout. By thinking through a flow of basic and potential actions that users might want to use, we used pieces of paper to include possible screen switches under each task. In the end, we took pictures of each piece and uploaded them to Figma to build an interactive paper prototype so that anyone can play through it directly and give feedback. Here is our initial paper prototype link.

After building our initial paper prototype, we presented our prototype and got useful feedback from Team 3 in lecture. Sticking to Nielson’s 10 heuristics, we realized some violations and space of improvement for our current paper prototype. For example, Team 3 commented that “setting the lengthy survey as the first thing a user must complete before entering the app, it prevents users from seeing the functionality of the app so they can decide if they would like to use it or not. ” This violated the User in Control principle and caused the same confusion in our later usability test. Thus, the first main revision we came up with is to add an opt out option from scheduling and family profile in setup and move the scheduling and profile settings to our home screen. This enables users to finish rules agreement parts easily and do more flexible modifications later. The second interesting and critical revision for Cover is inspired by our usability tests. All of our three participants expressed confusion about how to select or build a schedule and that they might need some clarifications on some functions. To solve this problem, we added a help button on the right corner of most screens for assistance on confusion. At the same time, we started to figure out how to build our scheduling task in a more reasonable and aesthetically pleasing way, which is finally resolved in our digital mockup part. More than that, we also revised the safety rules part to add more flexibility due to the feedback from usability tests.

After in-class heuristic evaluation and usability tests, we finally have our revised paper prototype. Here is our revised paper prototype link.

Digital Mockup

Our digital mockup can be viewed on your phone or on this responsive phone simulator. — We encourage you to click through it as you read about the design!

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Welcome Screen and Main Menu

When the user first opens Cover, they will be greeted with this menu. From here, users can begin by building their family profile and defining schedules, or, more likely, define COVID rules and invite other families to the bubble. The help button in the top-right corner helps users understand the actions they can take from here.

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COVID Rules and Bubble Disagreements

Clicking the “Update Rules” button brings the user to this screen, where they can scroll through and indicate their level of agreement with different bubble rules. As each family has unique needs related, we’ve allowed the user to define their own rules through the “Custom Rules” text entry field. Once a family has updated their rules for the first time, they are allowed to invite other families to their Bubble.

When another family joins the bubble, they must move through the rule selection process prior to scheduling. If there are conflicts in risk tolerance levels for any rules, this “Rules Conflicts” screen will appear. Users must come to a shared agreement on all rules for the Bubble before moving onto scheduling.

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Family Profile

Creating a family profile is the first step towards childcare scheduling in our application. Users can add family members as adults or children, providing key information around school/work situations and other safety needs. This step is designed to be as simple as possible in order to get families onto scheduling with little friction.

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Scheduling Input and Viewing

On this screen, users can input their schedules on a 30-minute granularity level. Once submitted, all other Bubble members with Cover can view each individual’s schedule, seeing who is free when and making facilitating childcare simple.

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Request Coverage

When there is an upcoming schedule conflict, parents on Cover can request coverage of their children for a chunk of time. These requests will be visible in the schedule view and all other parents in the Bubble will be notified of the request.

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Offer to Host

The opposite of requesting coverage, parents can offer to host other children if they have a planned outing or chunk of free time. ___________________________________________________________________

Summary

Cover fills many needs by providing the framework for social interaction for families during COVID. By establishing a Bubble, families are able to crowdsource childcare responsibilities amongst individuals in the group, helping parents strike a healthier balance between work, childcare, and recharging time. Children benefit from their Cover Bubble by having more active supervision and crucial formative social interactions with friends. And everyone on Cover reaps the benefits of real-life human connection, arguably the harmful widespread condition of living through this COVID era.

Our team has thoroughly enjoyed this project, start to finish. We successfully pulled off a major task and design pivot, constructed a real web app (Shoutout Clint for the HTML!), and have grown immensely as designers. We’re confident that what we’re working on will make the world a bit more bearable for families living through COVID, and are so excited to have had the opportunity to share it with you through this article. Thank you for reading about Cover!