Design Jam Challenge
Our task was to design a tablet app to provide a safe way for high school students to discover design by pointing out how they interact with it every day, exploring the impacts of good and bad design, and inspiring them to explore their own design paths. We were given a week to brainstorm, ideate, and receive feedback on our prototype.
DURATION
DESIGN JAM
1 Week,
Sept 10 - Sept 18, 2020
College + Amazon Design by Adobe Creative Jams
TEAMMATE
ROLE
Bre Boersma,
Designer
UX/UI Designer, focused on branding & early stage prototyping
Process
Audience
Our target audience was high school students– a demographic that interacts with technology uniquely and more consistently than other groups. With this in mind, we thought critically about how students interact with technology daily and also how can we get invigorate a passion for design through technology.
Brainstorming questions about the app's audience
Problem Statement
How might we educate and inspire students to gain the confidence to become involved in the design community?
Inspiration
I looked at elements of popular social media apps. Some ideas I considered were Buzzfeed's personality quizzes, streaks on Snapchat, quick snippets of content on Tik Tok, and community threads on Reddit. Effective features such as these are what drives a lot of the platforms’ success, which is something I wanted to infuse in our design app.
Screenshots of inspiration from websites/apps
User Personas
I created two personas to consider and visualize what types of people would benefit from the app.
Maggie, 17
James, 15
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Doesn’t know what she wants to do (likes to draw, but only sees it as a hobby)
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Keeps up with her social medias daily
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Becomes unmotivated and discouraged easily in school
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Wants to study computer science
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Only thinks design careers are for artsy people
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Plays a lot of video games and scrolls through Reddit often
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Highly stressed about his future
We brainstormed a web of solutions, thinking about how other apps are utilized by teenagers and strategize how users interact with apps. Rather than following through with every avenue, we were able to streamline the best elements from each idea to culminate our final design outline.
Brainstorming solutions
Possible solutions
Sitemap
Information architecture of the proposed app
Sketching
A quick sketch of the different screens
Branding
Font
Girloy is a modern geometric font that has a cohesive but contemporary feel.
Logo
We chose the broad term of "Visual" so that it would not make the app feel too niche towards a certain type of design.
Light blue = serenity, trust, calm, refreshing
Purple = elegance
Pink = young and bubbly
Taken together, this palette feels like a nice, trustworthy escape from normal stressors for high schoolers
Color Palette
Feedback session
Halfway through the week while transitioning our sketch to Adobe XD, my team met with an Amazon UX Design Manager to ask questions about our solutions and receive feedback. The most important tip we got was to make sure our app conveys our intention of inspiring young people specifically who want to know more about design. We accomplished this through our language and content choices. Following our feedback session, we incorporated more language to convey this.
Ideate
As a group, we decided the main features of our app would be to encourage users to come back often, provide personalized content, and to promote a sense of community. We did this through three main pages– videos, quizzes, and community.
Reflection
This was a challenging project that made us think deeply about the audience we are designing for. This is especially challenging when the topic is something teenagers do not consider to be important in their daily lives. We had to get creative in developing solutions that would fit this role. Ultimately, we believe our app successfully encouraged a sense of confidence in its users.
If we had more time, we could have:
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Edited the visual design to utilize space better
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Performed user testing to get an understanding of how others perceive the app intention
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Expanded on the community/profile component to add more interactivity
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Added a more expansive variety of content
Overall, this was an amazing learning experience and I thank Adobe and Amazon for providing the opportunity!
