Smart Camp
Ironhack week 3 | 2 people group | 4 days project
Smart Camp Inc. is an educational company that offers summer camps about ecology, music, yoga, cooking, and technology for teenagers (12–16 yr.old). However, many teenagers are unable to attend the workshop camp due to time and cost reasons, but still, want to take part in a course.
Our task is to find a way to provide an engaging online experience for those teenagers that cannot attend the workshop camp. We will create an online learning platform that will transform the in-person learning experience into a digital experience, so teenagers with less time and financial resources can join the camp.
Meet Josh
After interviewing 8 teenagers of different backgrounds we designed Josh, our user persona. Josh is a 14-year-old teenager that lives in London. He loves playing football with friends and videogames, especially Fortnite.
In the summertime, I hang out with my friends. We go to the swimming pool, play football and play videogames.
A summer day for Josh
Josh wants to go to the summer camp with his friends, but he can’t because of economic reasons.
This is how his typical summer day looks like:
Josh wakes up late, he has lunch with his parents and they tell him he should be doing something useful. He spends the day playing video games indoors or playing football with his neighbor. At night time he checks social media until late. All the days are quite similar and he gets bored with this routine.
We created this user journey to get a better understanding of the context of the user:
Key research insights
The most key insights to keep in mind from the research are the following:
7 out of 8 of the teenagers interviewed have a smartphone. They use the device to check social media, to keep contact with friends and parents and for learning purposes as well. That is why our viewpoint for this project will be the smartphone.
The teenagers also mentioned that they want to spend time with their friends or make new friends. They use messaging apps to text to each other.
They are also interested in playing videogames like Clash of Clans or Fortnite. That is why we decided to integrate gamification on the online platform so the users stay motivated and engaged.
The interviewees also mentioned that online learning is harder than in-person. That is why we need to make the online platform engaging for them.
Finally, all the teenagers are very active, they play sports like basketball, football or volleyball and they like to compete with each other.
Problem definition
After creating an affinity map and an empathy map, all the research insights lead us to define the problem and to set the How Might We question:
How Might We keep the teenagers engaged and motivated with an online learning platform?
Ideation
In the ideation phase, we used the Crazy 8s method to generate ideas for the platform. We came up with the concept of an app where the users create an avatar, they take the lessons of a course and when completed, they get points. They get to compete against the other users of the platform (there is a ranking) and also to chat with them through their avatars.
After the general concept for the app, we decided which features were a priority using the MoSCoW technique. The features we choose to prioritize are the following:
Photography course content
Profile/Account
Free trial
Security/content protection (target users are underaged)
Smartphone viewpoint
We decided to have the photography course as a start point for the online platform because the interviewees use Instagram and Snapchat and they have access to their smartphone’s camera.
We organized the content of the app with a sitemap.
For the prototypes, we focused on the pages in color of the sitemap. Those are the “happy path” for our user persona: the user creates an avatar, selects a 7 days free trial, selects the photography course and takes the first lesson. The grayed out pages of the sitemap would be developed in the next steps.
Paper prototype and testing
We tested our paper prototype with 4 users and with the feedback received we tweaked some screens and added extra buttons to give the user the option to go back to the home page.
Mid-fi prototype
We designed a mid-fi prototype with Sketch and tested it with 4 users. The user task was to create an avatar, select the 7 days trial option, enroll the photography course and take the first lesson.
After the tests, we modified our prototype again. The homepage was a bit confusing for some users so we added a pop-up window with instructions. We also added a descriptive text beside each lesson so the user can have an overview of the content without having to click in.
Take away and next steps
For this project, we used a Roadmap, the Kanban method and we did Stand ups every morning. All these tools were very useful to organize the workload, to know where we were and what we were aiming for that day and to keep track of the tasks.
We had some challenges prototyping with Sketch as this software doesn’t allow us to have multiple people working at the same time on the same document. That would have balanced better the workload and speed up the prototype phase. We weren’t able to test the interactive prototype with the smartphone either. We had to do all the testing on a laptop which is a very different device from the one that we were designing for. Apart from that, testing the prototypes and iterating was essential to fix issues and improve features.
The next steps for the Smart Camp app would be to develop the rest of the screens of our sitemap (profile page, forum, search, contact and report sections), to add courses and lessons that our users could be interested based on our research (cooking, painting, video editing, piano, basketball, and football) and to create content in collaboration with Youtubers to keep the teenagers engaged.
