Rebuilding teacher attendance for Indian schools.
When schools went remote in 2021, attendance moved into WhatsApp groups and admins were left reconciling it by hand. I designed Teno's Teacher Attendance module, a web console for admins and a mobile flow for teachers, that turns daily guesswork into rules set once.
The pandemic broke the attendance register. With teachers working from home, there was no biometric machine or sign-in sheet left, so schools fell back on WhatsApp: each teacher texted a login and logout time, and the admin copied them into Excel at day's end.
That workaround failed in three ways:
Teachers forgot to post, or posted hours later, so admins chased people every evening.
Admins worked out each teacher's hours to decide full day or half day, one by one.
Patchy records made salary calculation slow and, at times, wrong.
Multiple schools asked Teno for the same thing: a way for teachers to mark their own attendance, and for admins to approve it and keep the record.
Design a system where teachers mark daily attendance and leave on mobile, and admins approve and maintain that data on the web.
Before designing anything, I ran open-ended interviews with admins and teachers, backed by a survey and a competitive benchmark of attendance tools. Sample: 8 admins and 40 teachers across 8 schools, plus 121 survey responses. The interviews were in Hindi and Marathi, school staff working in their own languages, not office workers used to HR software.
“सब का attendance मुझे मार्क करना पड़ता है।”“I have to mark everyone's attendance myself.”
“कधी कधी मी विसरून जातो ॲडमिनला inform करायला की मी logged out केलं…”“Sometimes I forget to tell the admin I've logged out.”
| Finding | Heard from |
|---|---|
| Admins were the human database, re-entering every WhatsApp message into Excel | Admins |
| Teachers forgot to report in and out times, and nothing reminded them | Teachers |
| Full day vs half day was calculated by hand for each teacher, every day | Admins |
| Messy records turned payroll into a slow, error-prone task | Admins |
let teachers record their day in seconds, and let admins approve a whole school's attendance without doing the maths themselves?
If the admin defines timings, late marks and holidays up front, the system can judge full day, half day or late on its own.
Marking in and out should take one tap, with a nudge when it's missed and a clear route to fix it.
Multiple timings, regional holidays and local leave policies had to be expressible, not forced into one template.
I mind-mapped the admin and teacher sides together, then cut the result into a site map. The key move: the shift became the parent object. Every rule a school cares about, week-off, in and out time, late mark, half day, holidays, which teachers, lives inside a shift, so one school can run several timings without extra setup.
I tested the hi-fi prototype (v5) with 6 school admins in unmoderated, recorded sessions. The task: create a shift and add teachers to it.
The sessions surfaced six issues, most of them about real school policy the form couldn't yet express:
| What we saw | What it told us | Design response |
|---|---|---|
| Some schools apply a sandwich-leave policy | Leave rules vary by school | Sandwich-rule toggle in shift setup |
| Some schools give alternate Saturdays off | Weekly off isn't always weekly | 1st/3rd or 2nd/4th Saturday option |
| Admins were unsure what Half day and Late mark meant | Labels assumed shared definitions | Info tooltips with a worked example |
| Admins wanted to limit where teachers can mark from | Trust needs a location check | Geofence / location on each record |
| Notification wording felt unclear | Messages read as system-speak | Copy rewritten in plain language |
| Too many colour legends in the approvals table | Colour was overloaded | Legend trimmed to fewer statuses |
Teacher Attendance moved schools from WhatsApp-and-Excel to in-app, self-marked attendance with rule-based approval.
WhatsApp + Excel
Teachers texted times; admins typed them up and did the mathsIn-app, self-marked
Teachers mark in one tap; admins approve by rule, in bulkFour of the six test findings were school policies, sandwich leave, alternate Saturdays, location rules, not UI problems. A policy survey before wireframes would have caught them a round earlier.
Each new policy became another form field. A rules-builder pattern would scale better as schools add edge cases.
I'd set baseline metrics, admin minutes per day, missed marks per week, before launch, so the impact story writes itself.
Rules set once. Attendance that runs itself.