Online enrolment system

School enrolment is a service with three audiences who never meet: the parent filling in the application, the school office staff processing it, and the principal who has to approve it — often from somewhere other than a desk.

Designing only for the parent would have produced a clean form that dumped an unusable queue on the school. The engagement covered all three surfaces deliberately.

Three surfaces, one service

• The parent application — the public-facing form, designed for people completing it once, often on a phone, sometimes in a second language, frequently while missing a document.
• The school processing workflow — the queue, the checks, the requests for missing evidence, and the handoffs. This is where the service either absorbs variability or pushes it back at the parent.
• A principal’s mobile app — because approval was the step most likely to sit waiting, and the person doing it was the least likely to be at a computer.

Field research over workshops

The useful material came from sitting in school offices rather than running workshops about them. Enrolment queues have a rhythm — the start-of-year surge, the mid-term transfer, the out-of-area application that needs a decision. None of that is visible in a requirements document, and all of it determines whether a workflow design survives February.

A journey map that stops at submission is a map of the easy half.