OPEN ACCESS
Being involved in a wide range of extracurricular activities is a crucial for adolescents to develop into vibrant adults. However, access to diverse activities is often restricted based on wealth.
MOSAYEC, a non-profit working with adolescents, asked us to break this access gap by creating a platform that allows any middle school student find, manage, attend, and reflect on meaningful extracurricular activities.
Full Brief
We set out to understand the goals, motivations, and barriers for students to engaging in extracurricular activities, the effectiveness of current activities in their personal development, and what role technology plays in their lives.
Research Plan
Competitive Analysis
Domain Research
SME Interviews
Participatory Research
Co-Creation Workshop
After reviewing key articles and papers, we interviewed parents and experts working with teens. We found key trends in extracurricular involvement, social and emotional development, and tech usage.
73%
use cell phones
87%
access laptops
Parental trust of logistics and organizers key to students’ involvement
school based
1
non-profit based
2
business based
3
When a student’s contributions are valued by others, they gain the confidence to shape their own lives and the world around them.
We also wanted to understand how others were tackling the problem of increasing access to activities and helping students use those activities to grow.
No comprehensive list of all three activity types
No connection between activity and student development
Lastly, we wanted to understand students’ extracurricular experience more deeply. Interviewing students individually proved difficult, so we ran a series of co-creation workshops to directly observe behavior.
To understand students’ motivations we asked them to brainstorm ideas for their “dream” activity that they could invite others to.
Students were able to articulate clear interests, and base creative ideas off of their interests
Parental consent is the biggest roadblock. We had students make an poster with all the information that they would need to get parental approval
Details like cost, duration, location, structure, and sponsors were most important to parents.
We ran interactive ice-breakers, creative brainstorms, and feedback sessions to test if interactivity, creativity, and affirmation were key components of a positive experience.
Students were surprised to be affirmed for their creativity, and recruited more friends to subsequent sessions.
To see how capable students were in reflecting on their experiences, we set up a questionaire with three levels of difficulty:
The activity was ______________
because ______________
What did you learn about yourself?
What did you learn about making?
Students struggled most with open-ended questions
Students’ main frame of reference was school experience
As we reviewed the research, we discovered that the student-parent relationship was integral to student development and involvement. So we modeled both student and parent archetypes.
Curious Independence Seeker
Wants to explore his own interests apart of parents
has to ask permission to do anything outside of school
pressure from parents to fill schedule with activities
Directionless & Restless
Wants to connect with others like her and escape stress and boredom of home
doesn’t have many positive adult role models encouraging her to succeed
doesn’t know about nor have money to attend activities that fit her interests
Involved Gatekeeper
Wants to know and approve every detail of his kids’ schedules
kids go to activities other parents recommend or are run by people he trusts
Finds coordinating logistics for kids’ activities too time-consuming
Overworked & Overwhelmed
Wants her kids to be safe to stay on the right track
Hard to find ways to keep kids busy while she is at work
Can’t pay for activity and transportation costs
Because Sean, the “Curious Independence Seeker”, is the student type with greater needs, designing an experience for him (and his parent) will also solve most problems the other users have.
We discovered that Middle school aged kids like Sean need a way to find activities that align with their interests and social needs, convince authority figures in their lives to let them participate, and keep a record of positive affirmation of accomplishments.
Passion Manager + Social Scrapbook
We propose creating a platform where students can explore all locally-available activities (built on partnerships with schools, non-profits, and businesses) based on their interests, learn to manage limited resources, and build an ongoing “social scrapbook” to reflect on their experiences and positive feedback.
Users can manage their entire experience from one place
Easy to show parents and get approval, make decisions
Feels personal because it is tailored to their interest and gives them an unique record
leverages already-existing content to scale quickly
all-in-one portal gains broad audience for custom content/offers
Increases parental engagement, and therefore revenue opportunities
Opens business relationships with schools, non-profits, businesses, and universities
1. Set interests by category and neighborhood
2. See suggested activities based on interests and history
3. Explore activities by category and see activity details
4. Add activity to add to “going” section in Profile
5. Manage and trade items on list of 7 possible upcoming activities
6. Upload photos and write memory on activity “timeline”
7. See feedback and comments from organizers
After creating our wireframes, we wanted to see if our concept was something that actually solved students’ problem and how close it was to their mental models. We tested students using our application and had them brainstorm their own variations.
Students loved the design. After we iterated on the interface based on our testing, we created a interactive wireframe prototype in Proto.io to deliver to Mosayec.
“I am simply astonished at the work that was possible in three weeks, and the amount of progress this team has made.”
JEROME
Mosayec CEO
We presented our work to the team at Mosayec, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. They decided to extend the contract with DESIGNATION to have a UI team design an interface based on our prototype.
The design is ready to be handed off to the UI team. We focused on an initial iteration of the product, and want to recommend improvemnets to the product as it launches and grows.
