Encouraging teenagers to explore design careers and create their first projects
Timeline: 1 Week (Fall 2020)
Project Type: Design Jam (Adobe x Amazon Creative Jam)
Team: Aivy Phan, Audrey Kho and I
Programs Used: Adobe XD
My Role: UX Designer
The Prompt
Design a tablet app (Android, Fire, iPad, etc) to provide a safe way for high school students (ages 13+) to Discover Design. This app should encourage students to:
Discover what design is and how they interact with it every day
Help them see the impact of good or bad design
Encourage them to explore jobs/careers in design
Inspire them to start their own career in design
So… Why aren't High Schoolers Designing?
To start our project, we broke down the pain points that high schoolers might have when trying to find out more about design careers and how to pursue them. We highlighted four major issues:
Stigma. Oftentimes art and design are not seen as valuable or "good" careers.
Exposure. Schools don't put as many resources towards arts and design programs so students aren't aware of the possibilities.
Knowledge. Design is complex and so are the tools used to create designs. Without schooling, students don't have the knowledge to get started in design.
Access. Design programs and software are expensive so they are not always easily accessible to teenagers.
Low-Fidelity Ideas
Over the course of an hour, we generated 20 unique ideas for how to address this problem. We narrowed this down to a couple of potential solutions that we sketched our way through until we came out with a bunch of lofidelity sketches of our ideas. With these, we were able to visualize our ideas and combine them to tackle the various pain points.
Moving Up to High Fidelity
Based on a combination of our low fidelity sketches, we began creating our app within Adobe XD. We wanted to showcase the first works (hence, Project #1) of professional designers so that high schoolers could be inspired rather than intimidated by the industry. We also wanted to allow the students to begin designing for themselves. To incentivize participation, we created design battles with awards that would create some friendly competition, while also encouraging learning good design principles. Throughout our app, we have to scatter opportunities for learning, such as highlighted words with pop-up definitions and examples.
Translating to a Design Language
Throughout our process, we iterated through various brand aesthetics, whimsical, a darker theme, or even a simple and clean white design. Eventually, we settled on a combination of navy blue and white with colored confetti. The confetti creates more fun and playful environment, while the navy blue and white are sleek and give a good contrast. We picked basic iconography and simple readable fonts.
Time to Hit Submit
After working on this project nonstop for a week, meeting with two amazing mentors, receiving invaluable feedback, and continuing to edit and perfect, it was time to submit our final project. We ended up with three main focuses of our app that connected to our pain points.
Explore
The explore/learn page of the app is where students can learn about different fields of design as well as see the professional designers and their profiles. This page helps to show representation in the field of design. Each designers' profile features their first projects, which we believe will help reduce fear and stigma about design by making the field seem less intimidating.
Design Battles
This series of pages is where students can apply the design elements that they learn throughout the app and try to design things themselves. The prompts for these battles originate from the prompts of the professional designers' first projects. Students can challenge a friend or a random user to a design battle. They design to the prompt as best as they can, and once submitted professional designers can give feedback. Everyone votes on the designs to name a winner. This part of our app is meant to encourage learning and application that isn't always available in schools.
Art Board
This is the space where students can actually create their designs for battles or just for fun. We included this because some students don't have access to design programs and software. It is a simple design space that has 2D sketching and 3D modelling and can help familiarize students with common tools and techniques.
Learn
We wanted to add in more concrete ways of learning design, so throughout our app important design words are highlighted. These words can be clicked on to open a popup that gives a definition and an example. This way students can learn important design words that are used in industry.
Reflecting on My First Design Jam
This was a wonderful experience for my first design jam/hackathon, and I will definitely participate in more in the future. I thought it was really fun seeing other people's creations and collaborating with others at my school that are passionate about design.
In terms of our creation, I am rather impressed with what we came up with in just a week. I have never done a project in such a time crunch, and never completely online with people I've never met. I learned a lot about working as a team and how to use a completely new design product!
I think our app's information architecture was the true downfall. The organization and navigation wasn't as intuitive or straight forward as it should have been. I also think we spent too much time figuring out the aesthetics of the app rather than focusing on the content and functionality. I would love to revisit this project in the future and do a redesign!