Eureka App is the final result of long weeks of work at the User Experience Immersive course at UXER School, following the principles and processes of Design Thinking: Empathise - Define - Ideate - Prototype - Test
Persona
To start our project, we were given a few fields to choose from: smart cities, finance, e-commerce, tourism… We opted for Education, because we considered it an important issue and because we did not have much knowledge about it, so it seemed like an interesting challenge.
Firstly, we needed to get to know our potential users, as well as their concerns and aspirations. To do that, we conducted in-depth interviews to a total of 26 parents and teachers. The main conclusions that we extracted from the interviews allowed us to create our persona. We decided to focus on the Parent User, because they had more unresolved concerns than the teachers, and we created Sara Puig: an energetic, middle-class working mom.
Empathy Map
We also created an empathy map of our persona, to form an idea of the environment that surrounded her and to understand how she thought and acted. The map helped us perceive that our persona worried about her children's education, but she did not know how to contribute to it, and that she had a positive attitude towards new technologies
Storyboard
A storyboard allowed us to imagine our persona in a real situation and outline a first type of solution to validate our hypothesis. We used the Crazy Eight method on that first solution to find its basic functionalities, and chose the best ideas through a Dot Voting.
First prototypes
It was time to verify our hypothesis, and to do that we made two very simple prototypes with Marvel:
KEX Prototype, a kind of Time Bank where parents would contribute with their time and knowledge to help not only their children, but also other students with doubts about their homework.
Challenge Your Brain prototype: a gamified platform with a lot of practical content and theoretical support, where parents and children could solve their doubts. To test if parents had interest in getting involved, the platform had a question titled "Ask at home" in which parents necessarily had to intervene, since it was a question related to the household.
New Interviews
Because research is a transversal process along the development of a product, we thought it was convenient to speak to parents again, this time in front of our prototypes, to find out if we were solving a real problem. From those second interviews we extracted new conclusions:
1 Secondary school students do not want to ask their parents for help with their homework, and their parents also prefer the children to be self-sufficient
2 Parents do not have much time to help their children with homework during the week
3 Parents find very interesting that children learn things from real life, and they have the feeling that they do not learn them at school.
From these conclusions, we obtained a very enlightening insight:
Parents are worried that their children can not make a connection between what they learn at school and real life and therefore children don't care about what they learn, because they see no use in it.
Time to Pivot
From there, we tried to continue with the gamified platform "Challenge Your Brain", combining homework with learning about "real life". However, in a financing round we had in one of the course sessions no one supported our idea or business model. So it was time to pivot. We went back in the process and examined the problem again.
We decided to forget about homework and instead focused on the moments of contact between parents and children that took place far from formal learning environments, but not from learning life skills: the moments of leisure. Using a Stakeholders Map, we analysed the learning moments unrelated to school that parents and children shared, which basically took place during their free time.
Eureka!
This way we realised that there were a series of activities of leisure, very appropriate for learning life skills, of which many families did not take advantage. All of them were outside of the house: museums, theatre, circus, nature…
Considering all of this, our persona and the insight we had obtained, we built a user story that pointed us towards the right solution:
As a parent, I want to do activities with my children to have new experiences while we learn together.
And that is how Eureka App was born, having the following core values: Discovery, Family, Learning, Going out and Fun. Eureka is an app that suggests all kinds of leisure activities for parents and children to do together, with a series of challenges to conquer in order to obtain badges and points, which can be exchanged for tickets and discounts to do more activities.
First of all, we defined the elements that would make up the app, lay them down in a sitemap.
Once the sitemap was structured, we began sketching the first screens and workflows of the app
Wireframing
After that, we started making the first wireframes with Sketch. We defined a series of buttons on the top navigation bar and the bottom tab bar, which would take the users to the most relevant sections of the app.
The App
Regarding the visual design, we leaned towards bright and happy colours, that would get the children's attention, but that were also fresh and harmonic in the eyes of parents. We also created a mascot for the app: a racoon. We picked this smart and skillful animal to accompany parents and children through all the challenges. With regard to the font, we decided on one with rounded lines, the Dosis.