How Can Big Idea Shape The Foster Care & Adoption Experience When it Comes to UX Design?
“In the research space between strategy and copy testing, advertisers have an opportunity to systematically uncover and develop the big ideas that can propel a brand’s creative communications.” (Hernandez, 2012).
Big Idea is an important step during design processes. The step comes after the extracting user insight and defining the problem, and the idea experiments qualitatively and quantitatively through user tests in order to refine design solutions.
In our previous article, we introduced the problem definition for the foster care and adoption system and used “How Might We” statement (HMW) as a way to identify big ideas to the problem.
“How might we provide actionable solutions for
the foster care and adoption process in order to reduce trauma for all the people involved?”
After the problem definition, we featured the HMW for our foster care project. Children, pre-adoptive parents, and social workers; the three actors play important roles during the whole journey of adoption. However, each of them experiences different pain points while going through the journey. It seemed to us providing a strategy approachable by each actor would be very much needed to address individualized pain or trauma during an adoption process.
During our human-centered design process, we used the 5 Why method to collect data and generated a list of problems in order to identify solutions. The solutions also emphasized their consideration of cultural and ethical perspectives. This article mentions the pain points that we found and proposes three big ideas for each problem that can be implemented across different media platforms.
The first pain point is the communication gap between social workers and pre-adoptive parents, making the entire process slow and tedious. “Technological Integration” aims to integrate the process into a digital platform and provide an efficient working environment for social workers. Second is the rigid nature of the events for foster children and pre-adoptive parents. We redesign the events and turn those into “Fun-Spirited Events” that feel comfortable, welcoming, and interactive.
The third problem is the impersonal communication tool that is used currently. Welcome Book is one of the most important means for children to learn about their potential parents. However, Welcome Book often fails to make a significant impact, since it does not provide guidelines for parents and lacks consideration on the age, gender, ethnic or cultural background, and more. Therefore, we propose “Welcome Framework” for pre-adoptive parents in order to facilitate personalized curation of the book content, along with a user-friendly digital solution. In the next article, another of our teammate will present a deeper dive into individual ideas and detailed proposals for a better foster care and adoption experience.
