Teaching school kids about Product Design
I recently mentored at the The Girls Day School Trust’s annual Techathon. Here’s what the girls, and I, learnt.
The girls arrived excitedly that morning ready to tackle the creative challenge: working in groups to come up with an idea for a new digital technology product or service for the music industry. Not only did each group have to come up with an original idea, but they also had to create a prototype or mock-up, accompanying website, a marketing video and consider their funding options, before pitching their idea ‘Dragon’s Den’ style to the judges–all in the space of a few hours! This eventful day was punctuated throughout with valuable talks from inspirational female entrepreneurs in the tech industry, who encouraged the girls to realise that their potential has no limit.
The girls stepped up to the challenge enthusiastically! There was an instant buzz of excitement from the moment the stopwatch started. The girls decided they wanted to make an app for learning to play a musical instrument and ideas about all the things it could do, and what it could look like, started flowing immediately. My role as a mentor included sharing my industry expertise, so I had to quickly jump in and advise the girls not to eagerly skip straight to the end. After all, you can’t design a mock-up of the product if you haven’t even thought about what it is going to do, or how it will do it!
Together, and with guidance from their teachers, we discussed how the most meaningful and successful products are the ones that solve problems out in the real world. We asked each other what issues have we have observed relating to learning music, and one girl told the group how she is trying to learn to play the piano, but often finds it quite difficult to remember which key is which note. And from that, the girls decided an overlay on the piano that lights up the corresponding key when you hesitate to play a note would be really useful!
Once again, practical things first. We needed to make sure we set ourselves an achievable goal for this “first version” of the product. So to help us choose the features appropriately, we chatted about who specifically the product would be aimed at, and what the most common use cases might be. The next step was then to research what was already on the market to make sure our product was unique.
Once the girls had all agreed on of the details of the product they would be pitching, they split up to tackle different areas of the project. As the design expert at the table, I helped the girls with designing some sample screens of the app. We chose to design the home screen menu first, so that we could easily show people what the app would do. We discussed how we can style things differently to make text more readable and buttons look more clickable, and how we could use the same colours, font and app icon across all our other presentation materials to make everything match.
I soon discovered that mentoring the girls wasn’t just about sharing design tips and advice, a lot of the skills they were practising that day were very new to them: ambitious project management, collaborative decision making, presenting ideas to a group, etc. My role included encouraging them when they were on the right track, reassuring them when they had done something well, and helping to give them the confidence that their goal was within reach. It was really rewarding to see the nervous but genuine smiles as they presented their carefully considered product proposal, followed by a happy sigh of relief after the pitch was over.
