Design 14 (for teen)
App for teens to discover design
Overview
Background
Design 14 is the deliverable of a 7-days Design hackathon, which is hosted by Adobe and Amazon. In a team of 3 designers, our goal is to design a tablet-based platform for teenagers to explore design.
Our design rank Top 10% out of 450 teams!
Duration
1 week (design collaboratively) + 1 week (iterate solely)
Team
Xinyu Wang; Vivian Wu; Jia Jia
My Role
UX Designer & Researcher
Due to the time limitation, we kept the content of some interfaces high-level. But after the design hackathon, I decided to refine the details and get rid of the placeholder text.
Furthermore, I made several iterations based on testing and research. And draw storyboards to better illustrating the story of this project.
Project Brief
Project Deliverable
Research
Refine Research Questions
To start, we refined research questions for targeting user pain points through interviews effectively and searching related online resources efficiently.
How familiar high school students are with design?
What are the challenges for them to learn and get interested in design?
What are the difficulties for them to long-termly maintain their interest and inspire them for design careers?
Know the answers from research methods
Quantitative Research: we received 97 survey responses from high-schoolers.
Qualitative Research: we interviewed 2 of them.
Besides the insights from users, secondary research about how students learn differently at different grade levels and how to help teens learn at remote learning helps a lot when we are not really familiar with our target audience.
Pain Points Summary:
Students are easily lost in overwhelming information resources.
Most of the online resources are not tailored to students’ personal preferences and grade levels.
Courses are not attractive enough for students.
Students tend to lose the motivation of learning.
Turn pain points to HMWs
Solutions
Pain points 1: Students easily lost in overwhelming information resources.
“Tons of resources are good, but I really have no idea of choosing which...😢”
Solution 1: Curating organized and categorized resources for students diving into learning quickly.
We realize that the first challenge for teens to start exploring design is not limited resources, but they were having trouble choosing courses.
Which is the one they can get started with? Which course should be the next step? Practicing is essential for design, so which are project-based courses?
Especially for students in grades 7-9, most of them lack the skills to organize information efficiently.
As to solve this problem, we curated the design curriculum that includes all aspects of exploring design: courses, fun games, and design workshops based on their grades, interests, and learning habits.
However, how might we know and collect learning-related information such as grades, interests, learning habits from students? We need to figure that out since this question also resonates with the second pain point we mentioned above.
Pain points 2: Most of the online resources are not tailored to students’ personal preference and grade levels.
“More often than not, I start taking a course and then realize it doesn’t suit me 🤯”
Solution 2: Providing personalized content through the fun and Gen-Z oriented survey.
We can just ask high-schoolers to fill a normal survey. But our users are teens, who are creative, energetic, and easily bored with old-fashioned stuff. We really should reference some hit elements for this survey to better tailor their experience!
A survey, but more than a survey. Much more fun and has a much more positive impact when they are exploring!
The fun survey is important since we also take another pain point: "no fit courses" into account.
Tiktok, Instagram, Snapchat are popular apps for teens. Polls, quizzes, and Q&A can be fun even popular on Instagram and Tiktok. So we were thinking about why’s that? Vividly background, chill topics, and short sentences might be the answers. So we pick a trendy color, intuitive emoji, and simple questions to form this survey. Besides, we used a blurry effect that tried to combine gamification for better engagement.
Pain points 3: Courses are not attractive enough for students.
“Some content is just not attractive enough and even shorten my attention span 😵”
Solution 3: Trackable learning experience with attractive content help students in different grades always engaged in learning.
From the secondary research, teenagers, especially adolescents in grades 10-12, often benefit from chunking information into smaller pieces and working flexibly to gain mastery. So we provide different types of design resources: video courses, interactive games, and 3D virtual tours.
For students in grades 7-9, there is a significant increase in strategic planning and goal-directed behavior. However, they lack the skills to monitor their own behavior and consider long-term consequences. Therefore, we should help them track their learning progress better and always remind them how much effort they’ve already made!
Pain points 4: Students tend to lose the motivation of learning.
“Idk how many people like me that lack self-control when taking online courses...I tried, and I failed...for a couple of times 😭”
Solution 4: Bonding with community can help students insist on learning.
Find community with real-time map
Learning with the community
When designing with limited time and not familiar with the target audience, secondary research really helps. Teenagers take pride in achieving independence and maintaining their social relationships. Based on that, providing as many opportunities as possible to help teens feel connected to their peers will be crucial.
Social-Modeling from the psychology theory also supports our design for co-acting with someone to increase people's performance.
Sociality can boost the growth of the community and increase engagement.
Solution 5: Guiding students to learn with a goal can help them stand out earlier in the career.
Some high-schoolers might start thinking about what they can do in the future. If the design is what they are passionate about, how might we bridge their interest and career effectively? How might we let teens figure out if a design career is what they are longing for?
Many influencers are active on different social platforms. They are willing to share their experience and knowledge, which can help teens know real life. For different tracks of design, we provide related majors that students can have a glance at. Besides, they can schedule meetings with design mentors to ask questions.
Takeaways
1. Better communication, better collaboration
As a designer, one of the challenging and amazing things is collaborating with others equipped with diverse backgrounds and personalities! When working remotely with limited time, better collaboration becomes even more important. All of us three are good listeners and communicators. So whenever we felt stuck, we can solve the problem quickly with amazing teammates’ support!
2. Research cannot be sacrificed.
Research might be a tough part, especially in a design sprint. However, when conducting user research and secondary research, I have the feeling that research guides me in getting closer to the target audience. Sometimes I may be surprised by some survey data and impressed by how different that people think about one thing. Listening to users’ stories and thinking about how I can help them solve those pain points are enjoyable. Research needs efforts, but it’s rewarding to guide us to design the right product and do the right things for our users.
3. Next step
After the jam, recap all the steps we did. During the ideation, a question that we thought was meaningful was watered down during the design process. Most students said they feel overwhelmed by tons of recourses, but resources are limited for low-class students. How might we help them explore design with as little cost as possible? I think that’s a good question for our next step.