Project Overview

‘Orbit’ is a new digital system designed to enhance the Starlight Children’s Foundation’s in-hospital programs by tracking user participation and facilitating important administrative processes - without disrupting the fun! With this system, our team has brought together technical and creative skill to develop a completely bespoke solution that meets the unique needs of this extraordinary organisation, at the same time as adding some excitement to the normally tedious task of user registration. Starlight programs already make an incredible difference in the lives of sick children and their families; with Orbit supporting them, the sky’s the limit!

Project Commissioner

Starlight Foundation

Project Creator

Odecee

Team

Kent Walsdorf
Samantha Hoskins
Felicity McMahon
Luke Simpson
Tim Watts
Stas Likane

Project Brief

Orbit is a custom-built user management system, specially designed to support Starlight in making their hospital programs even bigger and better. The app at the centre of the system facilitates easy user registration, enables detailed reporting and supports Starlight staff in day-to-day patient and room management. NFC allows for low-touch sign in/out for users to ensure minimum friction and address patient accessibility considerations. LCD screens display customised messages to deliver a personalised user experience.
Orbit manages:
- Registration. The registration screen captures data from multiple user types quickly and easily.
- Sign in/out. NFC technology allows users to sign in/out with one touch.
- Customised messages. When users register or sign in/out, LCD screens display a personalised message (including birthday countdown!) and design.
- Profile linking. Users can be linked to establish connections between families/friends.
- Bulk upload. Starlight staff can bulk upload user registrations.
- Data management. Staff can input, amend and overwrite data.
- Patient management. Staff can quickly access relevant patient info (e.g. parent contact details) for better room safety and management.
- CRM integration. Full integration with Starlight’s Salesforce CRM.
- Reporting. Reports on all data can be instantly generated via the app.

Project Need

Starlight was looking for greater insight into how different users were interacting with their many unique and varied hospital programs. Their existing data collection process – based on paper forms and manual data entry – was labour-intensive and vulnerable to error. Starlight needed to more accurately capture and report on usage in a way that was sensitive to users’ needs, appropriate for the hospital environment and conducive to program delivery. Cost and compatibility were also big considerations; as a nonprofit, Starlight needed a solution that would integrate with their established systems and deliver maximum value for investment.

With no existing solution to handle the particular needs of Starlight and its users, we needed to create something new. Odecee experimented with different approaches to determine how the system would work; ultimately, a combination of technologies provided the flexibility needed to fully customise the system and provide a little ‘wow’ factor for users while still keeping costs down.

Orbit is a customised system, not a commercial product; still, one can see its potential broader value. User data offers invaluable insights to organisations, but in high-traffic physical settings (like exhibitions, conferences, festivals, etc.), it can be difficult to track engagement without interfering with user experience. A system like Orbit - which provides fail-safe data collection with limited user input – could be a very useful tool for organisations looking to get a better picture of how users interact offline with their brand, products and services.

User Experience

Starlight programs have many users, including children, parents, staff and celebrities; to further complicate things, children using the program vary greatly in age, development, health and physical capability. Providing a positive experience to users is fundamentally what Starlight programs are for – if the new system didn’t support that, there was no point in having it at all. As such, user experience was significant driving force in conceptualising the solution.
Interviews were conducted with representatives from all user categories to ensure the system was suitably designed for Starlight users and the hospital environment. Detailed personas and user journeys were developed and desires matched up with goals. A concept was developed pro bono by Odecee, explored and prototyped at Odecee’s internal innovation event, Sprout. Odecee’s team worked on-site with Starlight to deliver phase 1 of the system; from here, the team ran an extensive pilot phase with users in the hospital to gather feedback.
User response was overwhelmingly positive; kids love the ‘tap on/tap off’ technology and personalisation, parents enjoy the simplicity of the digital interface (as opposed to a lengthy paper form). Starlight staff are delighted with how quickly and easily they can now do their jobs. Ultimately, despite the complexity of the system – its many different users, its sophisticated functionality and the large amount of data it manages – Orbit is simple, fun and non-invasive, allowing users of all types to interact with it in a way that enhances their program experience, rather than detracting from it.

Project Marketing

Orbit has been designed especially for Starlight, with no current plans to make it commercially available. The primary goal is to ensure Starlight can meet their organisational goals without adversely affecting their users, not to make a lot of noise in the market. As long as Orbit is still relatively new, the smaller the ‘splash’ it makes, the better. With this being the case, the marketing efforts around Orbit so far have been mostly focussed on educating Starlight users about what it is and how to use it. Starlight’s programs are highly-personalised and mostly built on face-to-face interaction; as such, Starlight has been running a small, in-hospital campaign to support the initial launch, with Orbit ambassadors stationed on-site to assist users and champion the system.

Eventually, Starlight plans to introduce Orbit into all of the 10 Australian paediatric hospitals in which they conduct programs; drawing on Starlight’s extensive network of media relationships, the nationwide rollout will be accompanied by comprehensive online and offline marketing campaigns across all major channels.

Odecee works primarily with Tier 1 banks, developing high-visibility apps that require extremely robust security - there’s no room for error when it comes to privacy in our work. The engagement with Starlight is no different.

Project Privacy

Orbit has the latest industry best practice privacy features built into its design, including high strength encryption for data stored and transmitted from the app and strong user authentication to prevent unauthorised use.

Business Operations

These apps help businesses across a range of business operations activities, from managing personnel, project management and customised apps for specific business processes and tasks, we're looking for apps that make it easier for businesses to run both day to day operations and improve their business functionality and efficiency.
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