Summer Begins!
Exploring and Designing New Directions
Dissecting Our Collab Session
For our first agenda of summer, we decided to look back to the spring semester and analyze all the feedback we got from the collaboration session with our clients and South Fayette students. About 10 students visited us, and we received a range of different perspectives about what worked and what didn’t with our spring prototype. We also got a lot of ideas about what students would like to see in the prototype.
To make sure we didn’t miss any of the feedback, we examined all the sticky notes we received and grouped them into similar categories. A lot of the students mentioned they would want more visualization of information throughout the prototype. It also seemed that a survey to get info about students’ previous classes might not be the best way to gather reviews for our course descriptions. Students mentioned that many of their peers might not take the time to write a lot or something meaningful enough to post. However, at the same time, we have to be conscious of adding elements like a ranking system of classes or teachers, which may cause unintended issues.
Because of that, we then started to think about the goal of each feedback group before ideating any new ideas.
Divergent Ideas
Before tackling the two main goals of our Spring Prototype, which are helping students learn about themselves and helping them explore and choose courses for them, we wanted to step back and consider how we could approach our project from new lenses. We set out to use learnings from our spring prototype to explore new ideas and combat design fixation that can arise in long-term projects. We used a variety of strategies throughout this sprint to ensure that we were continuing to open new doors through divergence at this stage, rather than closing them.
One strategy we used was consulting peers and practitioners for ideation around the four opportunity spaces that we identified in the spring. We challenged them with our lingering open questions and encouraged them to explore with us, helping us see past our team’s potential blind spots. We captured many great ideas around course selection to inspire divergence around course exploration and selection as a key goal.
Returning to the key goals derived from our Spring prototype, we leveraged our goals as constraints to fuel creativity. Diverging within the goal of helping students learn about themselves gave us purpose and direction in our ideation process. Individual brainstorming, group ideation, and using a “yes, and” approach helped us push our creativity as a team further.
Participating in collective idea generation helped us push ideas further and develop a sense of collective ownership over the ideas that we wanted to test without getting too attached. From this, we identified 4 promising ideas for parallel prototypes. All four are focused on helping students learn about themselves and gathering data to personalize their experience, beyond just a quiz.
Prototyping Our Ideas
We decided to parallel prototype four ideas and test them out with students, narrowing down to the best two ideas — spoiler alert, but the ones involving visualizations seem the most exciting to students, clients, and practitioners.
Idea #1 is a chatbot that asks students questions about their goals and interests, helping them find a general direction in choosing career paths. We tested Meta AI’s performance by asking it to assume the role of a counselor giving career advice, and while it took some time to get to the recommendation, the answers were relevant and somewhat insightful.
Idea #2 is a vision board exercise for students to envision their goals and interests in a digital collage of images. Research proves a positive correlation between self-accordance and goal commitment.
Idea #3 is an avatar maker that helps students see their self-identity clearer by asking students to create an aspirational profile of themselves. In this prototype, we provide a range of outfits, props, and accessories that students can choose from.
Idea #4 is a series of short activities each representing a RIASEC attribute. This is a more hands-on alternative to the RIASEC quiz, which feels limiting and untrustworthy to some people due to its definitiveness. In this prototype, for instance, we can evaluate whether a student leans toward investigation by how much they enjoy doing a crossword puzzle.
Our Testing Session
As usual, we targeted lunchtime as the best time to get a lot of student attention in a short amount of time for our testing. We staked out a table in the middle of an open area just outside the cafeteria, set out the incentives (a combination of snacks and squishy fidget toys), and started snagging as many participants as we could from each wave of students. The squishy toys turned out to be a good idea compared to the snacks (the box was very eye-catching), and at times we had more students than we could run tests at once.
Toward the end, we had almost two dozen student participants recorded over the course of three half-hour lunch periods. This number is made more impressive by the fact that runs of prototypes like the vision board often took up to 20 minutes, and students were fully engaged the entire way through.
This testing session had a secondary purpose, though. Throughout the visit, we also collected a roster of student contact information for those willing to consider participation in further summer testing events—a key resource, as the high school semester ends shortly, and we’re still iterating!
With testing data and a list of potential future test participants at the ready, we are now ready to enter the analysis and synthesis phase for these prototypes!
Note: This project is not intended to contribute to generalizable knowledge and is not human subjects research.
