Amazon & Adobe Creative Jam - DesignJet
Product Design, UX Design, UI Design
Time
September 2020
My role
UX Designer, User Researcher
Team
Mingyue Qu (Visual Designer & Interaction Designer)
Shuchen Wang (User Researcher & UX Designer)
Tool
Adobe XD
Background
Amazon is committed to creating and leading programs that will inspire and prepare the next wave of designers in tech. Design thinking helps young minds develop a growth mindset in addition to important problem solving, analytical, and spatial-thinking skills. Design thinking embodies skills that will be valued in jobs that haven’t been created yet. It can be extremely challenging for high school students to learn about the many career opportunities in the design world.
The Challenge
This project is to design a tablet app that provides a safe way for high school students to discover what design is and how they interact with it every day and help them see the impact of good or bad design.
Process
01. Research
User Interview
Since our target audiences are high school students, we interviewed several students to talk about their opinions on the design industry and relevant courses they might have a chance to get to know about design cases. Most of the students held their curiosity about design but were puzzled by where to find systematic learning sources. We also interviewed an experienced educator, Sean Duncan, who is also the Head of the Winchendon School - NYC Campus about how secondary education could play the role in helping students to develop design skills.
The impact that we want to deliver to young students is a habit of how they think and learn. Everything in the design process is about iteration, and most importantly they are not a linear process. When students can learn design cases from a platform, the methodology of creating innovation and solutions is the impact that we want to bring to them.
Competitive Analysis
Following the interviews, we also did competitive research about existed design platforms and design learning channels recommended by students. Many of these platforms created their own databases that related to design and contained a lot of design works inside. However, they were still lack of systematic analysis and related innovative method to inspire students’ design thinking. Some of them only contained knowledge output but ignored the use of feeling for the young users. Thus, we summarized several points that we wanted to emphasize in our design concept. According to this analytical map, our goal is to fill out the need for a product that is less effort to use but also engaging for the young users.
02. Define
User Journey Map
Based on previous research, we made a user journey map of how high school students discover design from the awareness to post-explore.
According to the map, we found that the students would show their excited mood when exploring design. Their curiosity and thirst for knowledge would strongly promote them to go further and get to know something they were not familiar with but have interests in. This was the core that indicates we should make a concentrated effort to arouse students’ study enthusiasm.
