Bringing Summer Camp Home SMART PEOPLE Project
Case Study
There are two possible reasons why one could forget his/her last summer camp experience — either it happened ages ago or it was really bad. Otherwise, summer camp is meant to be “the place to be” during vacations for the majority of young children and teenagers as it helps to fill summertime with both pleasant recreational and learning activities, as well as it serves as a way to escape parental guidance and survive “on one’s own” for the first time. However, there are many children who for many reasons have no possibility to live real-time summer camp experience. This UX/UI Design project “Smart People” focuses on how to make summer camp accessible for everyone.
Meet the client!
This time our client is “Smart People” company that may be described as a successful business story in language learning domain. It is a five-year-old educational company whose secret lies in innovative second language learning method as they combine in-person languages courses with summer camp activities in order to attract more kids and teenagers from 12–21 years old. Despite the fact that they are doing well, there is an expressed need to expand the audience and optimise their teaching methods by making it more accessible.
This project is about creating an online learning platform for 12-21-year-old students. It will transform the in-person learning experience into a 100% digital experience that can be accessed by students at a lower cost.
Thus, as you can se above, task is to create an application that allows children to learn English language by entertaining themselves during summer holidays. The targeted public is young children from 12 to 16 years.
Entering user research field
It is quite difficult to determine when does the project really start. From the methodological point of view, one could say it starts with the setting of methodology and organization or the beginning of user research procedures. In my case it started the moment my bootcamp fellow Natalia approached me and invited to collaborate. Very soon we found that we share not only linguistic and cultural patterns but also educational background in social studies. These facts served as a sailboat to dive into empathy stage and start tackle our project issues from rather psychological point of view. Quite naturally the following questions emerged: “What is important to children between 12–16 years old?” “What are their main preoccupations, general state of mind, perceptions?” We tried to understand why they would be interested in online summer language camps. We have even touched mythological level as a double headed dragon representing our dual and co-dependent child-mother (parent) user appeared in the horizon. It was quite a task for us to fluently integrate them both into the project. The specificity and complexity of the task lies in fact that they are under parental control and must be guided in the choice of their activity. For this reason, we decided to address a survey to parents in a hope to obtain potential user insights.

Although in terms of quantity (only 15 responses) we were very far from calling the survey successful, obtained data revealed:
· The majority of respondents (73,3 %) would be interested in online activity for their children during summer holidays.
· Language learning is the most wanted activity for 12–16 yd children (66,7 %).
· Only 13, 3 % of children spend their summer holidays in summer camps, family trips and grandparent care are more popular among respondents.
Having these revelations in mind as well as the hope to get more responses, we went out to conduct in-person job-to-be-done interviews. Time was not on our side this time (not the first one, by the way) and chance being stuck somewhere in a subway, we managed to interview three users. Qualitative interviews appeared more valuable to us because there were some insights that blew us down from our so far assumption-based towers. One 13-years old teenager at MacDonald’s asked us directly:” Why would I join online summer camp during my holidays, I go to summer camps to meet new friends, to have in-person interactions. Isn’t it the purpose to go there?”Surprisingly, this reflection became our AHA moment, kicking us out to another level and guiding through UX design process. We finally started posing the question: “How might we make online experience feel close to real time summer camp experience?” As the answer didn’t land as a Christmas gift under the tree, a slight breeze of panic crossed our tandem. Time passed and we were struggling to grab something concreate. That’s how we started playing joggling game with a variety of different design thinking and data interpretation tools: Affinity Diagram, How-Might-We Statements, Empathy Map, User Journey Map, Moscow tool.

The decision was made to replace persona by job-to-be-done statement in order to maintain our double-headed user dragon alive and focus on a particual way to solve our problem:
“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.”
Approaching Solution
Finally, the solution was born somewhere between parent’s fears and teenager’s desires. From our interview we obtained hints about the fact that parents are not assured when their young teens pass too much time in front of the screens and especially surf online without surveillance as they find it to be insecure environment for their progeniture. On the other side, online activities are more than attractive to teenagers as they always find way to trespass the “forbidden.” However, there is a way to join two parts in order to satisfy the needs of our double-headed users and provide adequate user experience. Our solution is to provide a secure environment inside SMART PEOPLE application for the language summer camp participants so they could share their language learning experience inside SMART PEOPLE app. In this way we also bring real summer camp experience and online language learning experience together. By creating a Camp-Site-Wall we reproduce social networking model in order to make appeal to a larger audience and meet stakeholder’s needs. This application offers a choice of combined thematic packages followed by English language learning activities- workshops, live sessions and challenges to be accomplished. Now, let’s play another game here “Who will be the first to find a flow in these extremely low - fidelity wireframes?”

This messy low-fidelitity wireframing attempt, reflect perfectly the final stage of our project. As if the hours have started running a marathon while you try to bring your fragile design solution ideas to live. After came the time when we started creating application screens with Sketch that were joined together into a prototype which you can view below.

In terms of time Smart People was a “sprint” project as we had less than one week to come up with the solution and mold it into a prototype. Despite the kind and supportive regard of our personal design coach, the feeling was as if we were left all alone in the UX Design playground. It was up to us to decide what methods to use and at what moment or to set up our own designer’s journey map. No wonder that we experienced the moments of solitude, doubts, fear, anger, and even despair which seems so natural as you face your own human limitations and deal with evident lack of UX Designer maturity. Luckily, where is a will, there is a way! Our tandem has managed to find it, and (Surprise!) it appears to be not a small path but rather the entrance to a highway!
Best wishes,
Zivile
