Rebekah’s Lunch Review
This sprint is about evaluating our hypotheses!
…is what we would have said if you had asked us our goals at the beginning of it.
As we prepared to get out into the field, we realized that we had to test not only our hypotheses but also the key assumptions underlying them. Our theories about this problem space were built on what we learned from our clients and our desk research. And sure, initial client information and desk research are great, but we had to acknowledge the potential gap between those insights and reality — or at least between those insights and reality from the perspective of other stakeholders. We had to ask ourselves: what is this project really about? We had to go back to our assumptions and re-question the “obvious” things that we thought we had already established as fact.
“Students don’t even read the course catalog!”
Are we sure?
“Students need a type of course catalog to plan their courses!”
Do they really?
“Humans need certain information to make good choices from a set of options”
We think so?
This process can be scary. We wondered, “What if we walk out into South Fayette’s bustling cafeteria and discover that students DO love the current catalog, or perhaps that the notion of a course catalog is completely outdated, leading to a whole new problem space?”
Welcome to the challenge of design.
It was time to hunt these answers down by focusing our field research on these key questions. By facing possible failure at this early stage, we did the due diligence associated with taking risks in our work, and our project will be stronger.
Exploring early design concepts
We were eager to get some of our initial design ideas on paper, and we collectively came up with a few themes:
- Short-form media that captivates attention, such as videos and pictures introducing classes, or most interestingly, swiping through classes à la Tinder
- Personalization based on the student’s interest
- A way to design for conversation between students, and perhaps get advice from alumni about which classes to take
As we delve deeper into primary research, one question we hope to answer is — what kind of technology should we consider to best serve the needs of stakeholders and end users? Do students need a course catalog at all, if there is something else that better accomplishes the purpose of providing a well-rounded, practical, and personalized academic experience at South Fayette High School?
The World of Work
If we were 8th graders at South Fayette, we might use these traits from the RIASEC paradigm to guide us toward possible pursuits, both through specific career paths and general values we could seek to incorporate into our professional lives. South Fayette is exploring ways to encourage students throughout the district to engage with career thinking. Yet, our sponsors expressed concerns that these programs were not yet integrated at the high school level. We checked it out for ourselves and continued to consider what other systems or programs already exist that may support us in promoting our goal of preparing students for their journey beyond high school.
Investigating World of Work highlighted the potential power of tools that aid self-exploration, and how that information can be used to guide students. However, concerns about putting students in boxes also surfaced. As we move forward with this project, we are continuing to question how we might give students enough information to support them, without the limitations of prescription.
Of course, we had to take the test ourselves!
- Erin is investigative, social, and enterprising.
- Vivian is creative, enterprising, and conventional.
- Rebekah is realistic, social, and conventional.
- Lori is creative, social, and conventional.
Meeting school administrators
Last week, we visited the school for the first time and met with a few of the administrators of South Fayette: the principal, the superintendent, and curriculum coordinator. For our 1 hour meeting with them, we really wanted to hear their perspective about the problem space and what issues surrounded the course catalog. We conducted a mind map together and gathered some insights about why they wanted to update the course catalog and their perception of how students used it.
We also got some information about future school meetings surrounding course registration and hope to attend those to gain more insights. From the meeting, the administrators’ perspective seemed to somewhat echo our client’s responses during our kickoff meeting. As a team, we’re excited to interview our main stakeholders, students, next week and learn about their thoughts surrounding courses and plans after graduation. Other than interviewing the students, our immediate next steps also involve interviewing the guidance counselors to hear their thoughts about students’ concerns and courses.
Rebekah’s lunch review
I’m going to be honest, I didn’t anticipate a public school to have as wide a variety of lunch options as South Fayette High School. Growing up as a homeschooled kid, I generally heard school lunches spoken of with the same disgust as airline or hospital food. I always had a vague sense of relief that I would never be a fellow victim of my friends’ horror stories of cold, suspicious-looking, off-color mac and cheese or cold, tasteless cardboard pizza as my only food options until dinner.
South Fayette wasn’t what I expected.
While we got there late, there was a wide variety of hot and cold customizable meal offerings, a salad bar with extensive options, a whole section dedicated to hot beverages, a wide variety of meal add-ons like yogurt and ice cream…It honestly outdid the main campus of my 2018 community college, and that place was pretty well-funded. I’m going pescatarian on Fridays for the next month, so I opted for the salad bar and yogurt, and I absolutely do not regret my meal choice.
I will say that I noticed a stand with Turner’s “Southern Style Sweet Tea” and, being from Arizona (land of the 99-cent gas station tea) with a significant family presence in Texas, I had to try it.
I do regret that choice.
(Sorry, Pittsburgh. Turner’s has no idea how to do sweet tea justice. That thing had high fructose corn syrup AND sugar and somehow still came out bitter. At least their Arnold Palmer is decent.)
One of the coolest things about contextual research is the unexpected discovery aspect. You might start off a project with all kinds of preconceived notions about the problem and the environment around it. If you’re lucky, maybe you get some of that right. If you’re luckier, you get to visit the problem where it lives and see where you’re wrong.
Desk research can get you so far, and talking to people who have been around the problem space can get you a little further, but if you really want to find out what things are like and how to best design for a group and their values, you have to step into their shoes.
And maybe their cafeteria.
Xoxo,
Team South Fayette
This project is not intended to contribute to generalizable knowledge and is not human subjects research.
