Changing seasons, changing focus 💐

Now that the flurry of the spring semester has come and gone, we have a moment to share what we’ve achieved and learned as a team! Since our last post, we’ve been focused on a few ways to share the work we have done in the research-heavy first four months (yes, we can barely believe it, too) of our project with FAME. As we move into the summer, we will be turning the project focus over from research to design.

Equipped with our core insights and user needs, which we solidified this past month, we will transition to a design sprint timeline (see the GV Design Sprint for our inspiration), through which we will rapidly build and refine solutions to those needs. But first, let’s recap how we tied a bow on our research, through our validation sessions and spring presentation!

To help coordinate the team’s efforts, Martina illustrated a model of how the insights from synthesis and storyboard prototypes fed into our end-of-semester plans.

Wrapping up our validation testing

Early in April, we finished conducting the validation sessions for our conceptual prototype, which we introduced in our previous post, with five participants who identified as either current or former Black educators. During the sessions, we successfully solicited a variety of feedback from our interviewees regarding how the Teachers’ Academy would likely affect a participating Fellow’s ability to navigate the rest of their teaching career at a private school.

Each member of our team got the chance to lead a validation session, which involved walking the participant through our existing journey map of a Black educator and the service blueprint of the FAME Teachers’ Academy, then asking questions about how the blueprint would influence phases of the journey.

An example of a completed model from our validation sessions. In our conversations with Black educators, we focused on how phases of the Teachers’ Academy (left side of the model) would affect a Fellow’s early career journey (right side of the model).

The validation sessions gave us valuable face time with Black educators who have gone through the experiences that we anticipate Teachers’ Academy Fellows will face in their own careers. In fact, each of our participants had a unique vantage point in education, having taught for a range of years at the time of our interviews. For example, one retired teacher worked at the same private school for their entire career, while another participant has a teaching background and now serves as an administrator at a charter school.

Overall, participants seemed gratified to step through the models with us and critique the upcoming Teachers’ Academy in this structured way. By scaffolding topics of professional development and educator preparedness with this visual artifact built from our research, we hopefully brought a fresh approach to the problems that our interviewees and our client have already been contemplating for a long time. In turn, the interviewees’ willingness to complicate the landscape of our model, by bringing up consequences at a systematic and contextually aware level, greatly helped to push the team’s thinking about what Black educators need.

“Having used our previous work to create a visual representation of a Black educator’s journey, we were able to apply those visual models in our conceptual prototype. I was personally blown away by how much participants engaged with these models within our prototype, and how having a visual model enabled much deeper discussion.” –Alana Mittleman

Drawing user needs from our findings

Coming out of the validation sessions, we next got to work restructuring our findings to make them more specific, impactful, and actionable. To do so, we took to Miro again to collaborate on a massive affinity diagram of the notes from these five validation sessions, and ultimately grouped them by major themes corresponding to user needs, where our users would be the young Black educators enrolled in the Teachers’ Academy.

We grouped interpreted notes from the journey map conceptual validation onto sticky notes through an affinity analysis exercise, surfacing prominent needs of early Black educators.

Ultimately, we surfaced four Black educator needs that are grounded in our interviews and supported by our secondary research. As it stands, we see that Black educators starting their careers in private school need…

1. …skills to navigate the complexities of the private school system.
2. …teaching experience in a classroom environment that is analogous to that of private school.
3. …support and strategies to normalize and instill Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion values in the education system.
4. …practice prioritizing their well-being over their career.

We will move forward with each need in many “scrappy” sprints this summer to ideate solutions, build prototypes of various fidelity, test our ideas, and ultimately iterate based on the user feedback along the way. This way, we will slowly but surely approach a robust design solution that can address the problem scope we have identified on as many dimensions as possible.

“We have spent a significant amount of time familiarizing ourselves with this problem space, and being able to work alongside our clients and FAME Fellows in an attempt to create change in an outdated system is both daunting and exhilarating. While we may not be experts in the typical sense, we are uniquely positioned to advocate for both our users and clients alike as we continue to help FAME find success in its mission.” –Marlon Mejia

Crafting a presentation of our research

Leanne sketched the arc of the story of the presentation, and the team filled in the arc with touch points written on small pieces of paper.

In order to tell the journey of our work so far for our spring presentation, we went through many iterations of slide decks and scripts to balance presenting facts and figures with the urgent, emotional implications of the Black educator struggle. Just like with any design process, we started with mockups of our slides and talking points at as low a fidelity as possible. Throughout the process we asked ourselves, how could we best fit four months of discussion and discovery into a compelling narrative for both our stakeholders and our classmates?

It came down to what our team felt strongly about in terms of creative direction. Instead of simply presenting the linear process of the methods we tried and the insights we uncovered, we aimed to center the journey of a Black educator in a private school, which we originally embodied through our research-supported journey map. By placing an emphasis on our interviewees’ stories, we hoped that audience members could gain insight into the day-to-day struggles of being a Black educator at a predominantly white institution.

Sample animations from our presentation, with the red ball representing our persona of a Black educator. We used text callouts to focus quotes from our interview participants (left) and the insights we gathered about our users’ pain points (right).

For this presentation, we introduced a more abstract representation of our journey map in the form of a Black educator persona. To avoid falling into the dangers of stereotyping that are easily built into traditional marketing personas, we used a red ball to represent our persona and asked our audience to give the educator a name during the presentation. This minimalist visual treatment allowed us to incorporate animation principles, to add life and emotion to our “main character”—a Black educator.

In the end, the team really came together over many discussions and work sessions to realize this creative vision! Marlon was especially instrumental in building all of the animations throughout the slide deck, truly determining the cohesion of the team’s presentation ideas.

“The spring presentation was a massive part of our projects and I’m glad we had the experience because now we can budget our time accordingly for the summer presentation. I’m pretty proud of how the team came together to get the Spring Presentation done in an ‘all-hands-on-deck’ sort of way.” –Swetha Kannan

Prototyping for client collaboration

In addition to planning our presentation, we also thought ahead to what would happen immediately afterwards. In the presentation, we aimed to get the staff at FAME up to speed with the insights and user needs from our research, while also creating buy-in to our resulting project direction. Thus, the next logical step was to bring FAME into the design process, so that we could combine this fresh understanding with the staff’s expertise regarding education and their own organization. This next step took the form of an interactive co-design session with the client directly following our presentation.

Ideating rapidly to address user needs

You may be wondering how we’ve held back from ideating about design solutions while focusing on research — the truth is, we haven’t! After the excitement of synthesizing our user needs (listed further above), we rapidly sketched some solution ideas through a Crazy 8’s session. Time-bounding our sketching time during this activity motivated us to articulate as many “crazy” ideas as quickly as possible, so that no idea was too precious and could therefore be scrapped or manipulated further down the road.

Marlon marked common threads of ideas on the whiteboard after our Crazy 8s activity and discussion.

By the time of our co-design session, the seeds we planted in this initial ideation had grown into 12 storyboards that addressed our four user needs. The storyboards outline a variety of potential solutions, such as a journaling tool to reflect on teaching experiences and a database of crowd-sourced data regarding private school culture. With each storyboard, we hoped to speak to the specific themes of Black educators’ struggles that we had uncovered through our research.

Two examples of storyboard artifacts we created to represent how we could solve for young Black educators’ needs. On the left, “Private school scenario practice” would address the need for teaching experience in a classroom environment that is analogous to that of private school. On the right, “Co-journaling tool for teacher mentorships” would address the need for educators to practice prioritizing their well-being over their career.

Planning and running a collaborative session

The 12 storyboards we created as a team formed the basis of our interactive co-design session. We wanted to get these ideas in front of our client to narrow down the storyboards that resonated with them most; this evaluation would help us focus on what user need to tackle first during the summer. To further scaffold the collaborative session, we drew inspiration from the evaluative research method of speed dating, which involves rapid-fire presentation of and feedback on design ideas.

Leanne and Martina had to run through a lot of math to narrow down how we wanted to run the collaborative session. It helped to whiteboard our ideas in a mind-sharing session to quickly think through the logistics.

On our presentation day, we set this speed dating plan into motion in a private meeting with FAME staff. We hoped that after reviewing all our findings during the presentation, the staff would be eager to share ideas and thoughts that were running through our minds. We facilitated this initial brain-dump with a “Walk the Wall” activity, where we invited the staff to annotate printouts of our research artifacts with their own commentary on stickies. This quiet, low-stakes reflection period gave everyone the chance to become immersed in our interviewees’ stories and the collective journey map model that we had developed.

Walk the Wall session with our clients (left) and “speed dating” of our 12 storyboards (right).

In the second half of the collaborative session, we set our speed dating protocol into action. With Leanne as the facilitator and Martina as the timekeeper, we managed to rotate staff through three stations of four storyboards each within an hour! At each station, a team member would walk FAME staff through the four storyboards and facilitate a conversation about the feasibility and potential impact of each solution presented. Throughout the session, we encouraged staff to give each storyboard a numerical rating, as well as sketch out any visual ideas they had whenever inspiration struck.

After all was said and done, this co-design session heavily influenced the direction of our design activities for the summer. In particular, it accrued value for the next steps of our project in three ways:

1. Generative design and input, by allowing FAME staff members to contribute their own ideas for solutions.
2. Detailed feedback on each storyboard, which helped us frame constraints from the organization’s perspective that we will have to design around.
3. Quantitative measurement of needs prioritization, which we achieved by asking for numerical ratings of each storyboard on axes of “How feasible is it for FAME to implement?” and “How much would it impact the success of Teachers’ Academy Fellows in their careers?”

“I felt grateful for my teammates, who were understanding and confident about my knowledge in co-design. This helped me take ownership of designing and implementing the collaborative session. I led the planning of the [speed dating] activity, I delegated tasks, made handouts, found artifacts to paste on the wall…Just anything to pull this together. At the same time, my teammates were phenomenal in helping me make decisions on the planning, execution, and operations throughout this process.” –Leanne Liu

Kicking off the summer — Next steps!

Our team and the visiting staff from FAME all gathered at the end of our spring presentation for a group photo! Thanks again to all the FAME staff for engaging so thoughtfully with our work that day.

Needless to say, the collaborative session was a very productive way to wrap up our rigorous research phase and begin moving into a rigorous design focus! We’re still stunned that we’ve had this opportunity to take on such a complex and impactful project with FAME. Each of us has certainly grown a lot as a UX practitioner since first meeting each other as teammates! And it’s been a joy to be able to demonstrate this during the spring presentation in front of clients, classmates, faculty, friends, and loved ones who joined both in-person and remotely.

Since our summer session has already begun, many things are already in the works for the FAME team. Among them are changes we want to make to our team’s internal structure as we have come to understand each other’s work styles, strengths, and career goals. We are also hoping to adopt more concrete goals and success metrics for the remainder of the project at different levels, so that we stay focused and coordinated throughout the design process. As the very first FAME Teachers’ Academy starts up in June, we will also finally get to test our prototypes with the Teachers’ Academy Fellows themselves!

We celebrated our finish in spring semester by going to eat brunch at Pamela’s Diner. Fun fact — this was Marlon’s first time at Pamela’s, and now he kind of can’t stop going 😄

“I know the entire team is thinking hard about how we can further push ourselves to even better serve FAME and set ourselves up for success. In parallel with our first design sprint of the summer, we have been reforming our team charter and having conversations about how to optimize the full work days we will be spending together this summer. A lot of things are shifting but in a great way!” –Martina Tan