Remember when we were teens we were waiting summer holidays to go on adventure in a summer camp? For me it was a dream, but at this time my parents couldn’t afford or wouldn’t let me go on my own, as it was risky for them. Nowadays teens and parents have a lot of options how to fill spare time in summer. And this project is about these options.
Smart People
Let me introduce you to Smart people company! It was born in 2014 as summer camps project offering in-person language courses — English, Spanish, Italian, French, German and many more — for kids and teenagers from 12 to 21 years old.
Hundreds of teenagers join every year in different locations, as Smart people have a very special recipe: they integrate sports, outdoor activities, technology, humor, games, and other cool stuff to their mission of teaching a second language.
The company finds that they need to reach for those teens that have not enough time to go on an actual camp and maybe not enough of financial resources to afford physically going to the camp. And so they would like to offer 100% digital camp- feel like experience at an affordable price.
Challenge
The context and the task were set. I needed a partner to start the project, so I invited my fellow student Zivile to work together as a team. And here we are brainstorming our input data.
First we chose to target a specific age group of 12 to 15 years old teens as their goals would not be the same as for the young adults. At this age games and interactive learning are the core of any activity, language learning included.
Thus our goal in this project is to use foreign language as a tool or a key to all other fun activities, so that teens learn without even noticing that they are learning, just by doing things and using language day by day.
As we needed to deliver as an outcome of our research the mid-fi prototype our choice of language was English as a starting point. The MVP should incorporate English learning through different activities, so that teens could achieve a new level with an immersion through interactions with peers and native English teachers.
Hectic workflow “a la FrAgile”
Having a very strict deadline and 4 days of work, we jumped from one UX Designer tool to another trying desperately approach the light in the tunnel.
First we planned our timeline for work, deadlines and the deliverables for each day. We had a lot of tools to choose from at each stage of the process so we decided to focus 2 days on our Problem definition :discovering the context , users, and tasks and 2 days on Problem solution: ideation and prototyping.
The actual journey started rather chaotic and in the deep. Both of us coming from Social Studies background me and my colleague we started analysing our users and context in which they could make the decisions.
Interviews and Survey
We kicked off our search for 12–15 years old teens in the around area and decided we will probably find them in the famous computer games shop Micromania.
And…we found nobody there except adult gamers. So change of plans we go to MacDonald’s. Luckily it was lunch time, so yeeee we found our first ”victims”. Mom and her teen son and a group of teens agreed to answer some of our questions about their experience with summer camps and online learning. I had an interview with one of the teen moms by phone.
In total we managed to have 3 live interviews that were quite interesting as it gave us quite opposite camp and online learning insights from different points of view.
First revelation: at this young age parents are still the main decision maker as they pay the camps and they want their kids to spend their free time wisely and usefully. They also want to be involved and control the process of learning as they are preoccupied by online security issues and wants to be sure that spending time at home with computer or other device can actually be useful and replace the real life camp.
Second revelation: not every 12–15 teen have a free access to smartphones or desktop computers. It can be because of security issues or because of financial restraints.
Third revelation: even if the majority of city teens spend a lot of time on their devices, some of them actually don’t like gaming and prefer go camping or spend time outside on their own or with friends or adults.
Because of our targeted age group and the primal decision-making process involving parents (more specifically mothers) we decided that the survey will be addressed to teen moms.
The survey showed that most of moms would like their teens to learn a new language, to learn properly how to use the computers and still have fun maybe dancing or playing an instrument.
And it also backed up our hypothesis that both kids and parents prefer to have fun and do something new during holiday time instead of reviewing or adding classical school lessons experience.
UX Toolsamania
Knowing that the context is very important here, we decided to draw an Empathy Map for our 13 y.o. Teen. We imagined all the surroundings and thoughts he might have trying to figure out what to do during summer holidays. After that we defined the areas of our possible pains and gains to define the Job to be done and Problem Statement.
But still we had 2 different users to take into account : mother and teen.
The reasons of enrolling into a camp of those 2 users were bit different.
So I took a liberty to imagine that we have 2 Personas at the same time and here is their Story Map with our future online camp product.
For a teen it would be to have fun , to prove independence, to have new experience different from normal days, a need to stand off the crowd and some type of reward to show or to brag about.
For a mother it would be a peace of mind that her kid is buzy doing something fun but usefull during school holiday, to get a new skill.
This part of our research was a bit confusing for us as we saw that our stumbling part was to define Persona. as we had a two-headed person which is mom&teen.
But then in both cases we saw that there is a need to fulfill and thus it brought us to the next stage our Job to be done formulation.
When holiday’s coming I want to imerge into a new activity so that I can acquire new skills.
Using the 5 Whys techniques we digged a bit deeper to understand the real motives of teens and mothers before enrolling in any sort of summer camps.
And…..Voila!!!!I think we digged too much but well this is the Problem Statement we came up to!
Teens need a way to test their abilities (talents) because they want to prove that they are special.
I think it was a very pshycological and behavioral perspective of things.
Nevertheless we pulled our curious brains bits together before it spreaded into chaotic directions and decided to stick to the Job to be done to move on.
The time came to get to the core and start thinking about Solutions. How could we bring Summer Camp experience to those who can’t leave home?
Ideation and Solution
We used few UX design tools (How Might We, the Moscow method) to narrow down the possible solution for digitalizing Summer Camps.
The problem was reframed :
When I participate in online language summer camp, I want to have a way to chat and share with my mates, so I can feel as if I were participating in site-based summer camp and have fun
During the interview phase parents expressed their worries about unsafe environment online against safer environment at the real time camps where there is a circle of peers and teachers that they can rely on.
Here we approached the Aha moment where we found the way to the solution. Our App will provide a secure platform where teens could feel safe to share their language learning experiences and chat with each other and teacher.
Here is the Sketch like very low-fi drawings of our Design Thinking process.
Like in accelerated movies I will fast forward you to our final stage of mock ups and Prototyping.
Conclusions
We started rather late digging into solutions and thus it was quite a challenge to finish on time the MVP product. We learned about Project Management from mistakes of two humanitarian minded person trying to accomplish a real technical task. I named our project workflow as Fragile reaching for the real Agile method we were trying to mimic.
But at the end I was quite satisfied by the result and a good collaboration with Zivile. Misiing part for me is to know the UX Design Tool box good enough not to call it Jack in the box)
Thank you for reading!
