Fresh Start Brainstorming
The beginning of my final semester in grad school is here. Last we left off, it was mid-December and I had just presented my thesis concept at mid-point stage. It went OK but not great. Honestly, I was in a sullen and tired state of mind afterwards. At the time, the comments from the audience of classmates, former IxD students as well as professors and professionals in the field felt very critical and I felt I had to ostensibly start over. The three or so weeks off was much needed. I needed to decompress and not think about my thesis for a bit. As my thesis professor stated:
For now, the most important advice is to take a rest.
Clear your head.
Go to a sauna.
Then — look at your whole project with fresh eyes, as if someone else made it. Don’t be attached to the work you’ve already done. And don’t be discouraged by the scale of the problem. All political improvements happen incrementally.
I did all of the above and wouldn’t you know, I feel better. I also went back and listened to the recordings of my critique and it wasn’t as bad as I remembered.
My project is called Polly, a civics education tool/website for teachers in high schools to utilize in helping engage soon-to-be-of-age-voters understand how issues they care about tie in with whom we elect as our representatives in office. My project at the midpoint stage was sprawling, with many ideas crammed into one giant Principle prototype but still missing some crucial connecting points for the user. But as I learned from one of my recent interviews with Thomas Naughton, high school social studies teacher:
You need to have the epic before you can tell the short story sometimes.
Hearing that as well as positive affirmation from him and two other high school social study teachers in a round-table discussion early last week at the local high school that Polly actually looked pretty good and has some solid ideas made me feel better than I did post-presentation. Visually speaking after the 1st proto, I understood that I needed to clean things up. When I showed the proto to the teachers I was dreading their commentary on the visual design but instead they said this:
It’s pretty streamlined. I like this and I think there’s a difference between technology for education and just commercial technology. I’m fine with if that’s too much text, I like that. I don’t want it less than that. And I’d want more, like a link to the pier-review article or the college, organization etc.
They offered up some useful critique and suggestions which have been invaluable in getting me back into thesis mind-set. The main takeaway is that I am shifting from originally having Polly be a civics web-site to a more interactive app. As one of the teachers John Bohuniek stated:
We definitely have access to phones. We don’t have any tablet initiative. We have Chromebooks but I think this would be much better on a mobile interface.
All three teachers were in agreement so an app it is. Originally I thought that teachers wouldn’t welcome phones into the class as they would prove distracting but the consensus is that if there is useful knowledge to be gained by using phones, they do allow them.
Yesterday, in class we did a session called Fresh Start Brainstorming. I summarized my goals and my group brainstormed small ways to take the idea to further. Our new thesis co-professor Graham also listened in and gave his take.
After the critique, the break and the very insightful talk with the three teachers, here is where I am at for Polly: It is still issue based. I strongly believe that in order to connect with young people, you have to get to the heart of what they care about, issues that matter most to them. Rather than a sprawling website with a long onboarding flow, I will be making an app that is easy to understand from the get-go, laying out what the app does in a more interactive way. Polly will consist of short interactive quizzes, hyper-linked answers (the teachers couldn’t have been more emphatic about the need for hyper-linkable trustworthy sources for all of my content), live graphs seeing how the user’s answers compare to other students and a way to tie in legislation so that my feature allowing the user to contact their state reps is backed by a solid reference point. That was the main thing missing from my 1st semester presentation, the connection between the issues and actual bills or legislations that exist or have been considered. This was one of the most insightful comments from Thomas Naughton:
As we go through this, are they just building understanding on the issue? Or are they going to see party interaction with that issue? I was just thinking parties or organizations that have pushed legislation on these issues. It seems like you are focusing more on policies more than politics which I think is great because a lot of the civics organizations now are saying stop focusing so much on election day and voting itself. Focus more on policies and the issues. There are other organizations like voter orgs and websites that kids use that we use sometimes that based on the issues, what candidates in this election best align with that. I think it’d be interesting as they go from these base level questions about climate change, these are some legislation they should know about, even if you don’t tie a candidate or politician to.
In class yesterday, one of the questions posed was, “how does Polly crowdsource the information and keep the content updated and relevant?” I thought about Newsela, the website created for students to be able to read at their appropriate level. Newsela hires freelance journalists to rewrite articles in more digestible levels while still being able to link to the original. Polly could utilize this freelance writer model to keep content fresh and understandable.
Glenda asked, “Can you ask the app questions and have it provide answers?” I interpreted this as a way to make the experience more personal and relatable. Something to ponder.
Graham suggested giving the user various paths or sides to take to a logical voting conclusion. A #bandersnatch of sorts, allowing the user to choose which path they agree with to follow. I like this idea.
Kate asked, “Is there any way to understand how it works when you contact your rep? What happens to your message to them? What do they do with your request? What are the processes from end-to-end?” Also, can Polly provide practical info on where to find voting locations, things like that. Graham pointed out that this could be done just once and just be part of the platform. I did have a lot of this in my sprawling 1st prototype, at least conceptually. I called it ‘101’. We discussed and agreed that I should first focus on the system of the whole app then ‘101’ could be an added feature.
Kate also suggested a site called vettnews.com that shows ratings for various news outlets. It could be useful for my hyper-links. One of the teachers, John Bohuniek reiterated the following during our talk:
I would say this. There’s this false sense of balance and balance can make you really skewed if you’re always trying to show a side A or a Side B to it. But from our perspective as teachers, for every single one of these little factoids there should right away be something hyper-linked to where the information comes from. It’d be different if it was developed by an institution that we can already validate in another capacity, whether it’s a historical society or something. So for something like a 3rd party app, how can we trust the information in it? For every single thing for me and my students to trust this, there would have to be a hyper-link to the source that we can go ahead and explore.
The break helped. Now I am ready to tackle this thing full on and shorten the epic to something digestible. I’m most excited to take everything I’ve done and distill it in a way that is truly interactive and will keep the user engaged. I’m ready to throw out the excess and make something cleaner, less cluttered. I have overly focused on the quizzes and not tied them well enough to legislation and creating that a-ha epiphany for the user on why voting actually matters. I need to explore how to keep the user engaged in the app while also getting them fired up to vote. I want to wireframe like crazy to get the flow down. What am I dreading? I look at this project as a giant puzzle with a million pieces. I have most of the pieces but I haven’t formulated the big picture yet and need to proceed to painstakingly put it all together. In the first semester, I often times felt overwhelmed. Hopefully with fresh perspective I can come up with a solid solution. My ultimate goal after all is to have a truly effective tool that piques the interest of the next generation of voters. It’s no small task but I am ready.
