Connecting the Riverside Deaf Community to our student volunteer ASL interpreters

By: Danny Frank (@DannyHoney)

Where my Honeycode journey began

I’ve been partnering with a local community college American Sign Language Interpreter Education Program to coordinate student service-learning hours, and it’s been a passion project of mine. We were in great need of an effective way to connect students with mentors via a scheduling app, and I was dedicated to finding the right solution for the program. I tried other app building tools, but the user interface was inflexible and lacked the customizations for my needs. And then I found Honeycode. I was immediately impressed with the features, customizability, and mobile flexibility that I haven’t even logged back into the other service.

Before a custom tool was possible

We were previously using form documents and complex spreadsheets to schedule appointments; however, the process of creating the workbooks, connecting data to numerous sheets, ensuring that functions and formulas were operating correctly, etc. consumed a significant amount of time. The layout of a traditional spreadsheet also created a barrier for my colleague, who is dyslexic. Due to this barrier, I took ownership of the completion of these manual processes. Additionally, we noted that most of our students were accessing appointment data via their mobile phones instead of the web app. Our sheets' complexity significantly impacted the spreadsheet app performance, causing consistent crashing and delays in updates. These barriers inspired me to look for solutions that could convert our spreadsheets into a mobile app to better serve our students.

Last year I was invoicing for 15-20 hours a week. This year with Honeycode, it’s been 4-10 hours a week, cutting my time spent by up to 50%.

Along came Honeycode

Currently, we have three apps running off of one workbook. The first is for Mentors, which allows them to submit appointment requests to work with our students, the second is for the Students to see their upcoming appointments, and the third is for the Admins to submit the requests and confirm students on appointment. While the three-app approach is working right now, we plan on reducing it down to one app by Fall 2021. Ultimately, members of the Riverside Deaf Community will be able to submit appointment requests for volunteer student interpreters, students will be able to bid on these appointments, and admins will confirm students through our Honeycode app.

App Overview

The first step in using the app is creating a new appointment.

Once the form is completed, students will be able to see it in the list of available jobs.

Clicking on one of the rows brings the student to the assignment details page. While the photo below shows all of the assignment data, app users will be limited to what they can see based on their role (Student, Mentor, Admin). If a student is interested in the assignment, they can click on the bid button.

Once the students have finished bidding, the mentor or admin will close bidding and see a list of all students who’ve bid on their appointment. The mentor or admin then assigns a student to a volunteer by clicking on the green "+" button.

This is the details page that’ll display when a student has been assigned. The "x" button will remove the student from the appointment. The "verify" button will lead to another form where the student’s appointment attendance is verified.

Once a student has been assigned, the mentor or admin is able to send out a confirmation email to the confirmed student notifying them the bid has been accepted by a volunteer—voila!

Amazon Honeycode has significantly reduced the amount of time spent with setting up and connecting the Riverside Deaf Community to our student volunteers. It also offers reliable performance for our students to gain quick access to their appointment information. Additionally, my colleague, who struggled with accepting assignments and confirming students due to their dyslexia, now finds the process simple, easy, and enjoyable. Our Honeycode app has increased efficiency and productivity, as it’s reduced the amount of time I used to allocate to these processes. This is only the beginning of my Honeycode journey. I’m truly looking forward to exploring more ways I can leverage the app to better communicate with and support our students, as they’re the reason I’m a part of this program.

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What a kindhearted use case @DannyHoney! Thanks for sharing your story with us :slight_smile:

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Awesome Use Case. Congratulations to the you and your team!

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