User Stories

What are you doing with my baby?

Emily is a hard working middle to upper class woman, who has very little time to watch her child during the day, so she relegated to placing her daughter in a daycare center. She attempted to watch the baby while working from home, but it was difficult to give the baby a 100% attention. Knowing that she had to give some attention to the child, this would take away from the quality of her work as well. Her partner also has a demanding schedule, and although she doesn’t usually work passed 5pm, her work during the day consist of a number of meetings. In addition, she also has to travel twice a month.

Unfortunately, because of some extended family issues, which she did not care to discuss, Emily doesn’t have the option to have the grandparents or other relatives watch the children. Her partner’s family is located in Michigan. Additionally, it would be an inconvenience for them to drive from Medford to Saugus and to downtown Boston everyday. Therefore, they researched six different daycare centers and narrowed it down to only two.

They certainly considered the nanny circuit, but felt the baby was too young to have one stranger over the house with the baby having no ability to speak. This logic was consistent with their concerns of wanting to know what the baby was doing throughout the day when they are not around to watch. Emily felt that having a more established structure was best for organizational purposes. They thought it was best to have their baby around other children as well—for the “future social aspects”.

Each morning Emily wakes up around 6:00am to nurse her baby and starts her day off there. She takes some time to cuddle and “talk” with the baby, then changes the baby’s diaper, cleans her up, and puts an outfit on her. Some days she eats breakfast at the house, depending on if her partner cooks something, but most days she just grabs a granola bar, yogurt, and coffee. If she is rushing then she has nothing, she’ll settle for the coffee at the office. She alternates this process every other day with her partner.

She drives the baby to the daycare in Downtown Boston. There is no parking lot for the daycare so she has to find parking, sometimes double park, and run in with the baby. There is anxiety of double parking and giving her baby over to the teachers, especially if she is running behind time. Filling out paperwork doesn’t help with her anxiety and she would prefer to press a button that gives the daycare notice that the baby is present. If she is rushing, she could update the baby’s status at the office. She would go to her office and check off if the baby was happy or grumpy that morning, and can select the times in which she ate. The daycare would have the updated information instantly.

During the day, while Emily is at work, she gets notifications (optional) that her baby’s diaper was changed at specific times. She also gets the feeding schedule. To note: there is an option for Emily to have video monitoring on, she elects not to do that because of the meetings. However, shortly before Emily’s lunch time, she gets a video notification. Unfortunately, she couldn’t look at it until lunch. Now, lunch time has arrived, so Emily sits down at Cosi, while eating her salad, she opens up the app, selects the video message, and it has her baby outside playing and looking cute. This warms Emily’s heart to see her baby smiling, cooing and playing. When the short video clip ends, a floating heart comes up that says: “Hi Mommy, I love you!” This was a preselected phrase that the daycare teacher chose on her side.

No trees, no clutter

Emily reads through legal documents all day-everyday— it is the nature of her business. She has one paralegal specialist and an intern who help to sift through papers and other online documentation, but she still has paper work. Although her office is a little more modern than some of the older and larger law firms, it is inevitable to have trailing paperwork. She was relieved to not have to take any more paperwork home and get all the documents digitally. Although the app notifies her real-time about her child’s process throughout the day, she gets an email at 6pm that gives her the run down of the days activities. She can print this via .pdf or choose to save it.

At the end of the workweek, all the data in the forms are compiled and pulled into spreadsheets and graphs for her to analyze. The daycare providers and the pediatricians also can see this. Emily’s partner is a business analyst, so she enjoys looking at the statistics to identify any trends. She is delightfully having fun viewing the trends for the week, month, or even several years. Emily’s partner is much more Liberal leaning and is adamant about saving Brazilian trees and keeping their home less cluttered with paper. “I love my Kindle and Kindle App. Every book and paper should be digitized,” she said.

On the daycare’s side, this has kept things less cluttered as well. The Director of the daycare is ecstatic about saving money and time. The cost of buying long reams of paper is virtually excluded from the expense cost. More importantly, the average time doing paper work for her and the teachers have save upwards of 45 minutes a day. This valuable time is spent on the children or talking with parents. They would go through a ream [500 sheets] per week. In addition, buying and loading ink cartridges can be a pain point. At times, they would have to hire a contract technician to come in and help fix the printer since the Director didn’t want to pay the premium Ricoh contract cost. They print the forms every Monday morning and pray to not have to deal with printer issues to start their week off.

I see you!

The option to video monitor your babysitter, nanny, or daycare provider is becoming increasingly common. Emily goes to work and sometimes sits in her office all day with limited meetings. She looks at her schedule and realizes that it will be a day that won’t demand for her to leave the office, or she has only one phone meeting. She can select the button that will request video monitoring. The daycare will get the request and has to accept the “Facetime-like” request. Emily has two large monitors in her office, so instead of watching it on her phone or tablet, she elects to have it playing on one screen via the web app. Emily knows that she cannot pay close attention to the video all day, but has peace of mind knowing that there is something monitoring the activity.

For the daycare, this is a recording from their phone, tablet, or computer. They set up either one of these hardware devices and place it in an ideal location to view the classroom. The video option acts as a Skype or Google Hangout: any parent that has video authorization [Premium account] can request access and the moderator [daycare teacher] must accept them. All the parents will see the same thing and have the capability of texting as this is going on.

Emily has watched her child throughout most of the morning and goes out to lunch. She then activates the video on her iPhone and sends another request to the daycare. They accept, so she continues to watch the teachers and children while she eats her soup and sandwich at Au Bon Pain.

It is a Monday morning and Stephanie gets to her daycare center at 6:53am. She places her belongings in a cubby hole/locker and signs-in to the app. All parents that are connected with the app will be notified that the infant teacher is present. The Director also knows that one of her employees has signed-in.

Stephanie talks to some other teachers in the hallway about their weekend. She then proceeds in the infant classroom to wipe down the cribs and countertops for which the baby bottles will be placed. Since she has 15 minutes until the center opens she takes that time to microwave some oatmeal.

The center opens at the usual 7:30am time and there are seven individual parents coming into the building with their children. Two of the seven are infants, so Stephanie prepares to greet the parents and takes one of the babies that she was assigned to. There are six infants and three teachers, so the ratio is 1:2, well within the legal range.

The parent walks to the iPad and presses the button to notify that their baby is present. Now since the parent is not rushing, he checks the box for the baby being a bit grumpy. He also chose the ‘Did not eat’ option.

Stephanie is holding the baby, giving her morning comfort and notices the baby not smiling as much. The parent says good-bye to Stephanie and kisses his child on the forehead.

All morning Stephanie is marking off the amount of poops the baby is having. He is already up to six accidents in the span of three hours. All these notifications are real-time and the parents are getting them. Stephanie marked off that the baby ate only half of what he normally eats by lunchtime and that he “threw-up” once. The mom sees this and text: “do you think the baby is sick?” Stephanie text back: “Yes, do you have time for a call?” The mom calls into the daycare and Stephanie warns that she thinks the baby should go home early. The mom agrees, but can’t pick him up immediately, so she consults with her husband. The father already seen the notifications and the text exchange and had already gave notice to his manager and team that he may have to leave early to pick up his son. He was already packed up and left soon thereafter.

The dad arrived at the center to pick up his child and Stephanie reiterated the policy that the child must be away for 24 hours before they could come back to the center. The dad did not remember this, but looked through the app for the section on daycare policies. This was the policy that his wife signed before the child’s matriculation.

Stephanie sends the progress report to the parents, which end up in their emails. The mom sends that report to the Pediatrician. She contacts the office of the Pediatrician, who is not there, so she spoke to a nurse instead.

This is not a problem because the Pediatrician is in the loop from the daycare app and of course the nurse will debrief her. Therefore, the next time they see her she will be up-to-date.

Looking forward to the weekend

“Happy Friday!” Stephanie happily says to her co-workers and parents. Stephanie goes through the same routine she went through Monday through Thursday, except she had yogurt with granola and honey on top, along with a caramel latte from Starbucks. She meets and greets the parents again. She is also really excited to see the child back since he was out for several days with a bad fever and diarrhea.

The father of the formerly sick child marked off the ‘Happy’ checkbox and the time he ate before he left the house. Therefore, he just needed to notify the daycare that his child was present. He quickly kisses the baby on the forehead and continues on his way to work. Stephanie was already notified that the baby was happy and well fed, giving her more of a reason to have a wonderful Friday.

Stephanie marks off the eating times, the pee and poop times, and uploads a picture of the baby smiling with milk around his mouth. Stephanie gave this a tag: #breastmilkandchill. Everything looked normal and the parents were pleasantly relieved. Mom felt warm inside when she received the picture of her baby. Dad just laughed in his office at the tag!

The day ended on a good note. The mom picked up the child with excitement. Stephanie was happy that all the children were not sick. Lastly, all the children were picked up before 5:45pm. The teachers took 15 minutes to clean up/sanitize the room. They all had a half an hour to do anything they wanted until the meeting. Stephanie didn’t know what to do so she played Candycrush on her Android to relax.

The meeting was 15 minutes shorter than usual because the Director had all the reports compiled and was kept up-to-date throughout the week. She already had all the red flags and good notes and every briefing reinforced the things she knew. The Director announced that with reduction of some of the overhead cost, that there would potentially be a raise at the beginning of next year.

At the end of the day, Stephanie goes home 15 minutes early, has relax time, and gets great news of a raise. Meanwhile, the parents and the Pediatrician get a weekly summary in their inbox, along with statistics that they can view on the app.