Designing a Preferable Future for Career Preparation
The messy transition from Research to Design
Recap from the last post: We took last week to synthesize all the qualitative research from student workshops to working adult interviews. We created many artifacts to visualize and understands our insights from research.
Last week we created a few different resources to organize our research thoughts and insights: our second affinity diagram, identified student archetypes, and an understanding of how working adults arrive in career positions they are really happy with. Our next step was to figure out…
How would all of these rich insights and data points manifest in our designs towards a preferable future for career planning?
Walking the Wall to Inform Design Scenarios
We kicked off our designing with a “Walk the Wall” session. If you’re unfamiliar with what this is, its an exercise for the team to walk all the research artifacts (especially the affinity) to note down any questions, design ideas, or breakdowns they find in the data.
Through this exercise, we added many new notes of ideas and breakdowns to our affinity. Since our design space was still rather broad, we decided to create specific design scenarios before our visioning session to guide our design ideas. To do this, we grouped the breakdown notes we came up with during “Walk the Wall” and identified a handful of opportunities to design for such as: “Students not starting early enough” or “Students don’t know enough about themselves to start exploring”. Using these groupings, our archetypes, and our experiences with the students…we defined several design scenarios to use a springboards during our visioning session!
Coming up with the Ideas
With our design scenarios on our mind, we pulled our visioning methods from Google Design Sprint. Google Design sprint has a very structured flow to their design process and we thought it would work well with the information we had so far. In brief, had a few different steps:
- The team has to set the stage for what their designing for (this is where our design scenario came in).
- Gather information on the scenario to either get inspiration or facts to inform your design process
- Solo Rapid sketching of many different ideas, then a Crazy 8 exercise of some of your favorite ideas. This is to help generate many ideas and iterate on the best ones.
- Individually, take time to build out two of your best ideas into a storyboard / poster. It should be understandable on it’s own.
With these posters, we then reconvened to share our ideas with one another. We used small stickies to ‘heat map’ the best parts of every idea. Then presented our ideas with one another, making note of what we marked as the best parts of every idea.
To narrow down to our final concepts that we wanted to run with, we voted and landed on four core ideas (see below). We used storyboards as way to give form to our ideas, enough form to get reaction and feedback from people. First, we were able to present our ideas to Allegheny Conference and numo. Then, we did some user testing in the form of speed dating… lots and lots of speed dating.
Testing and Running into a Challenge
While we were going through visioning, we had done a bit of recruiting to get feedback on our ideas. Through the three versions of our storyboards, we talked to 8 students and 4 parents to get feedback and further understand the users we were designing for. While we were getting a lot of really great feedback to help inform our designs, we were receiving some pretty consistent remarks that challenged our designs quite a bit: students seem too busy being young high schoolers to use our system.
What do we mean by that? Many of our testing participants were involved in sports, extra curricular clubs, part-time jobs, or even just social events that the time they dedicate to actually thinking about their future was far and few in-between! So this made question a few things about our designs…
- What would really motivate a student to actually use our system?
- How can we ensure continued use of the system?
- How can we measure the influences the system has on students’ behaviors?
So how did we move forward?
Check out next week’s post to see how we moved forward with our designs, taking into account the challenges and feedback we received during our speed dating with users.
