UX Case Study: Smart Summer Camp for Low-Income Teenagers
UX Design Journaling — Ironhack Week 2
This week’s project is to design an application for a fictional company called Smart Camp. In order to complete that project, we had to work in teams of 3s and 4s. My team was composed of Mirkka and Monique (and Kasia for the first part of the process). Let’s dive in!

1) Understanding the client’s need
Smart Camp is a provider of summer camps for teenagers. They are happy about their camps however, they would like to be more inclusive and have more young people take part in the camp but not physically this time.
Some teenagers do not have the opportunity to attend a summer camp because of the lack of time or money but still would want to have a similar experience. Therefore, Smart People wanted us to create a learning app for them.
After reading the brief multiple times, we understood that the client’s project was very broad therefore, we set to interview teenagers as a priority before even framing the potential problem(s).
2) Understanding teenagers
Before further thoughts on how the brief should be comprehended, we thought that understanding the goals of teenagers should be the priority therefore, we have prepared an interview and a survey.
The Interviews
Our team went out to a public school close to Ironhack and to a closeby MacDonald’s. We have interviewed 10 teenagers, aged 14 to 17. The interviews went really smoothly, some were conducted in English and some in Portuguese. Some of the questions were:
- What do you usually do during summer?
- What is your experience about learning apps?




The Survey
The survey we posted on the first day got 35 answers on the next one. We mainly asked questions related to summer experiences such as:
- Have you ever been to a summer camp? If yes, please tell us about your experiences.
- Please, give us three words that come to your mind when you think about summer camps.
Talking to Teachers?
We could not get access to many teenagers because we barely knew any therefore, we thought we should also talk to people sharing their environment on a daily basis. Even though teachers are not our users, they might know teenagers better than we do since they constantly interact with them.
The interview went more like a guided conversation. The questions we had prepared as a basic framework were this time focused on the way students learn and how students spend their time in summer.
The Results
After putting together all the data and information we collected, we laid on paper the input that came back to most often.





Below are the main insights that we got:
- Teenagers don’t want to study (meaning they don’t want to be “schooled”) during summer.
- Teenagers go to summer camps to have fun, meet new friends and do sports.
- 91.2% of teenagers have already used a learning app.
- 88% prefer meeting their friends in person (vs social media).
- Most of the teenagers have experience with Duolingo.
3) Converging to the Problem
The Persona
Based on the above insights, we have created Sofía!

Because the brief was very broad — as it addressed students who did not have the time or the financial means to attend the camp — we have decided to focus on students who did not have the money but wanted to go to a camp since some of our interviewees mentioned that:
1. they could not (or did not want) to pay a lot of money for their summer activities
2. however, they liked being outdoor during summer.
The Problem
The problematic for Sofía could then be formulated this way:
How Might We provide Sofía with a possibility to make friends, have fun and experience an active summer without going to a summer camp?
4) Defining the Solution(s)
Ideation
We have decided to brainstorm the ideal solutions for Sofía by using 2 ideation methods.
First, we have tried the “Bad idea, Good idea” method in order to fire up very different ideas from the ones we would usually come up with.

For example, I have offered to create an app that would track the location of the user and give him/her more difficult questions to answer if he/she stays at home for long.
We then decided to go with “Round Robin” since we got good results from the previous project using this technique and could mix previous ideas with this method.
It was very difficult to reach a consensus when it came to which solutions should be chosen however, focusing on the usability and feasability of each idea, we have selected 3 main ideas to be tested with teenagers.
The 3 potential solutions for Sofía
Below are the 3 solutions we have decided to test with teenagers outside of the same school we went to when interviewing them.
- A Udemy-like platform for teens: an application where teenagers could learn with videos about various topics like cooking and photography and submit their exercises to a coach.
- A game-like app with rewards: teens would answer quizzes and collect coins (or points) that they could use to get discounts for outdoor activities like paintball or cooking.
- An activity-app where teens would not pay anything for the app nor the activities but the number of these activities would be limited and the activities would most likely be cheaper ones.
Because of time constraints, we could only test our concepts vocally, without papers. However, that went really well with students being curious about the solutions.
The first option and the last option have both collected 1 vote and the second option (the game-like app with rewards) has collected 3 votes.
After the tests, we were overwhelmed with the decision process because we thought that not having the board might have influenced the teens to answer “option 2” without having really understood all the features of the other options.
In order to make a decision, we drew a MoSCoW Chart which helped us to select the features that were absolutely needed (based on what teenagers told us) and we discarded “options” to focus on a working MVP (Minimum Viable Product).
The final solution…
…is a platform where teens could register for outdoor activities. There would be introductory videos to topics which would then be taught in person in a group of people.
Sofìa could also chat with other members of the “online summer camp” and with the coaches.
After taking part in the activities, she would:
- post pictures
- write a blog post (if she wants to)
Both would be checked by the coach, who would make sure that the content of the posts respects the guidelines and that the student did go to the activity.
Having an integrated pictures feed would also ensure safety since outsiders would not be able to get in touch with teens nor steal their pictures.
5) Designing the Prototypes
The user flow
We have worked and reworked the user flow to make sure it is aligned with the solution and that it would make sense for the user.

Low-Fidelity Prototypes
We have then been able to draft and test low fidelity prototypes of the application.




Mid-Fidelity Prototype
Below, the final prototype can be seen!
The task that the user is trying to accomplish in the video is the following: register for a cooking camp activity and leave a review after having attended it.
(The user has already received his credentials via email and now just has to log in.)
6) Conclusion: Key Learnings
- It is difficult to work with a very broad brief and very little directives. In our team, we understood the brief differently from each other and therefore, it was difficult to come to a satisfying solution. Fortunately, being a team, we have worked out a way to keep teenagers in the center of the design process and got to learn that, in doubt, it is always important to refer to what users want/need.
- It was a great experience to finally get to use Figma for wireframing since we had only used Sketch up to now. We could collaborate in real time and that was key to making quick changes on the final design.
- It was so rewarding and exciting to see the solution coming to life. We also had a survey respondant saying he would love to see the final application. I am looking forward to working on real briefs and solving problems “for real”!
Thank you all for reading!
