Desiary, a Tablet App for High School Students to Explore Design Careers September 2020
This is a one-week design challenge held by Adobe XD and Amazon Design, which asks participants to design a tablet app that provides a safe way for high school students (ages 13+) to discover design. Desiary is an iPad app in which students simulate a college student to explore and prepare for different design careers in a game setting. Moreover, the app connects students to real-world opportunities: they can find recommended activities, watch design workshops, discover events like externships, panels, or design challenges, share with friends.
Teammate: Xiujie Bi, Zhuolan Zhang
Duration: 1 week
Location: Remote
My role:
Context research, user research, user journey mapping, wireframing, UI design, iteration, prototyping, usability testing
Introduction
LACK OF CAREER GUIDANCE AMONG HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS
While people pay a lot of attention to students' career direction at college, many often neglect the importance of exploring careers for high school students, which causes students to major in an unfit subject or constantly changing college majors.
“Picking the wrong major can be an expensive mistake. College students whose majors don’t reflect their interests are less likely to graduate on time and more likely to drop out,” -Steve Kappler, ACT Assistant Vice President
Research
QUESTIONNAIRE
Objective: to better understand high school students’ needs for exploring design careers and the features they would like to include in a career guidance platform.
Sample Size: 20
RESULT
Key Insights
Based on our questionnaire towards 20 high school students, we found out that while students have the needs and want of acquiring design career information, they lacked the guidance of finding online/offline resources, and they wish there is a platform that could incorporate features of educational tutorials, gaming, externship opportunities, and socializing with friends.
Design Concept
DESIGN OBJECTIVE
Providing a tablet app in which high school students interested in design can explore design career options in a fun way, find relevant educational resources to advance their understanding of design and techniques, and discover recent events to be engaged with.
Idea Generation
User Flow
Wireframe
UI Design
Figure credit: Xiujie Bi
Usability Testing
COGNITIVE WALKTHROUGH
We asked 6 people to perform a cognitive walkthrough after our first draft of the prototype. The goal is to understand how quickly a hypothetical first-time user can figure out how to use an interface to complete a particular task.
We asked 4 questions to the users while they perform the tasks:
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Will users know what to do?
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Will they notice the correct action?
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Will they know what it means?
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Will they understand the result?
Usability Issues:
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There is no intuitive game tutorial. We need to add a introduction to the game.
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Language in personal profile can be more motivating.
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Four categories on the home page do not need scrolling.
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The icon for exiting game is not vivid enough, which requires redesign.
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Need more event blocks to enhance the scrolling experience.
Strengths of Cognitive Walkthrough:
- Quickly gain feedback
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Good for testing in-progress products
Weaknesses of our usability testing:
- We were unable to find 6 high school students to test our prototype within a short time, so the participants may not be representative of the system's intended users, which would lead to results that have limited value
Final Prototype
Click the screen below or enter here to interact with Desiary!
