SmallSteps is a virtual community that helps parents start and maintain neighborhood walking school buses—groups of children walking with responsible adults.

While walking school bus programs provide convenience and safety, they can be short-lived due to the burden on volunteers. To create a more rewarding experience for volunteers and sustain groups over time, SmallSteps is designed to help users conveniently manage walking school buses by providing simple tools to make daily tasks easier.

We identified a problem in that few parents allow their children to walk to school. Our research showed that even in walkable communities where families live close to school, parents are still hesitant due to concerns about safety and convenience. The design process began with a contextual inquiry, interviewing eight parents with school-age children. We also consulted with three representatives of the national Safe Routes to School organization. We created personas to guide our designs and through several low-fidelity design iterations to test our ideas. User feedback was essential in narrowing our design down to only the most necessary options. Finally, we built a high-fidelity prototype for the iPhone and conducted formal user testing.

The SmallSteps application helps parents find, coordinate, and participate in walking school bus groups. We approached our design solution with two main goals: to alleviate parental worries about their children's safety while walking to school, and to provide walking volunteers with an easier and more rewarding experience coordinating these groups.

Features:

• Parents can browse open groups in their area to find one that meets their needs.
• A dynamic interface with the real- time status and location of the walking school bus.
• Scheduling and notification tools for coordinators