What is the key to telling success stories about afterschool programs in high-poverty schools across the country?

Every year, thousands of students participate in academic enrichment opportunities during non-school hours across the 50 states, U.S. territories, and the Bureau of Indian Education. Teachers and providers deliver hundreds of thousands of hours of tutoring, homework help, recreation activity, job training, drug and violence prevention, and leadership development through the U.S. Department of Education’s 21st Century Community Learning Centers (21st CCLC).

As with most programs, these too must be reported on. After a long day of helping students to achieve more, that mountain of reporting sits and waits. Once the students leave, the data reporting begins!

How do you reduce the burden of collecting data and still have useful data?

To approach this challenge, the U.S. Department of Education hired us at the Tactile Group to create the first of its kind cloud-based data collection and reporting system for providers across the country to tell stories of success about their 21st CCLC programs.

After the first six months of design iterations, we presented a preview of this new system for the U.S. Department of Education to an audience of over 200 at the Beyond School Hours Conference in Orlando Florida on February 19, 2015.

But how do you do it?

The key is user-centered design and stakeholder collaboration.

Here at The Tactile Group, these two elements form the success for our clients’ projects. In order to build a tool that is designed with the users in mind, we collaborate with them! From the beginning of every new project, whether it is a website, a data collection and reporting tool, or a custom application, we teach our clients how to be co-designers with us. Part of being a co-designer is providing valuable user input along the way.

For the 21st CCLC data project, we meet with our stakeholders at the U.S. Department of Education, state education agencies, and program directors on an ongoing basis. Through design exercises and collaborative feedback, our stakeholders are in the driver’s seat. We build, get feedback from stakeholders, implement feedback into an new iteration, get more feedback, and so on until we deliver a fully-functioning user-centered application.

Over the course of the two days after our presentation at Beyond School Hours, over 100 stakeholders joined us for the latest round of feedback on the design for collecting data from their programs. The room overflowed with users as they opened up the application via our mobile computer lab. As co-designers armed with laptop PCs, iPads, Windows Surfaces, Galaxy Tabs, and Blackberry Zs, stakeholders test drove the new application. Listening to feedback, we heard that users do not have time to enter in data - they need to be with their students and run their programs!

So to meet their goal of focusing on programs and not paperwork (but still be able to tell success stories with data), we continue to iterate with this feedback. We are creating a clean, simple, and streamlined application. We will continue to build an interface that is intuitive, allows data to be entered one item at a time, and is accessible on any device. Less time with paperwork, more time for students!

So, that’s how you do it! Involve your stakeholders as co-designers and build a tool that is focused on the users.

Stay tuned for an upcoming post on what the data looks like!