How a 3 hour UX sprint improved my decision making — a UX case study
Adobe’s Creative Jam is a unique two-part creative experience where creative leaders share insights behind their design process and where students get together to design creative solutions on an interesting problem, using the Creative Cloud of course!
So when Adobe came to the University of Maryland to conduct the Creative Jam, I knew I had to take part!
Problem: Promoting Digital Responsibility
Duration: 3 Hours (That’s right!)
Tool(s): Adobe XD
Process: Double Diamond Framework
What is Digital Responsibility?
When we were first given the prompt “Promote Digital Responsibility”. I had no clue what it meant and I had 3 hours to design a solution around it. Scary situation!
But as UX people, we will often come across situations where we’ll have no clue on what our client requests. So I did what all of us would do, I kicked off the sprint by vigorously googling “Digital Responsibility”; scouring the web for papers, articles, videos etc. Finally narrowing down to this definition,
Digital Responsibility is the right and freedom to use all types of digital technologies in a fair and appropriate manner.
Infact, it touches on topics which are very much prevalent today. To name a few:
Cyberbullying
Responsible Digital Commerce
Safe Internet Use
Digital Security
Digital Ethics
Narrowing down and Defining the Problem
After reviewing the research, our next goal was to define what opportunity areas we should focus on. Now, time is of the essence. We couldn’t go about with conducting interviews, surveys etc, so we decided to take advantage of our team size.
Amongst our team of 5, each of us narrated a personal story where we wore the hat of a responsible digital user. The most common feature addressed was on responsible use of internet. This became the focal point of our design solution!
The emotional need for stories can enable us to fuse large information into story structures and have people cognitively involved. This is possible because when we hear stories, we relate them to our lives.
In order to promote responsible internet use, we decided to design an application which enables people to make an impact on the outside world while being intertwined with the Internet.
Designing for Positive Impact
I selected students between the ages of 10–17 to be our primary users since we wanted to educate the youth on digital responsibility with a goal that they will grow to be sound Digital Citizens.
After a quick brainstorming session, we decided on designing a solution where students will gain an online digital responsibility score for doing social good. We incentivized this solution by proposing that students may submit this digital responsibility score to potential universities as a part of their applications. Thus encouraging them to use the application.
Designing the Experience
Due to time constraints, we couldn’t define a visual guide. But fortunately XD has a great mockup resources section. Do encourage to check that out! We tweaked around the mockup to suit our design experience flow.
Events
Since we didn’t extensively interview users, I decided to follow design patterns from current widely used applications. The Events page has a Top Horizontal Scroll for users to select sections they are keen. I’ve introduced a green highlight over events currently undergoing. There is a pink highlight in bottom toggle to indicate state of page.
Feed
Feed was introduced to empower users to go beyond and sign up for social events. Beyond that it has a greater goal to build relationships between users by giving others a sneak peek into their DoGood activities.
Navigation Bar
The side navigation bar provides secondary information such as Messages, Registered Events, History and Contact Us. Primarily, it shows the DoGood points the users have accumulated from the events they took part in.
Results and Feedback
There it was! 3 hours of thought, collaboration and design. All about to go to the wire. After giving the presentation on our solution, we were ecstatic to be placed 2nd amongst all the participants!
This was the feedback we received,
Pro(s):
Good Visual Aesthetic (All credits to XD Mockups)
Incentivizing students to use application.
Direction of using DoGood points as potential University application submissions.
Con(s):
Quantifying a student’s social causes using numbers encourages a ranking system. “It sounds very Black Mirror-ish” (Actual Comment).
Learnings:
- Team dynamics and design accelerate when paired together in the right system.
- Ethical reasoning is an important factor and must be implemented into the design process.
- Timeboxing helps us focus our the bigger ideas and helps us avoid the never-ending rabbit-hole.
I thank the University of Maryland and Adobe for conducting this event, it was eye-opening and fun! Can’t wait for next years edition.
If you liked this article, do show some love! It will encourage me to write more about my experiences :)
