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Maven
Equipping the next generation with essential life skills
ADULTING 101.
It sounds boring, yes. But how many of us have ever struggled with a crucial skill as an adult and wondered, why didn’t we ever learn this in school? Everything from managing credit cards to eating healthy–-from setting boundaries in relationships to having good spending habits have to be learned independently, and hopefully it's learned the right way.
According to the Urban Institute, more than 64 million Americans have some sort of credit card debt. And according to the CDC, there were over 630,000 divorces in 2020, and almost 50% of all marriages end in divorce. Even without these statistics, we know we are missing something.
It asks the question, “how might we equip teenagers with the life skills necessary to be successful in their lives, not only presently but as they mature into adulthood?”
Why teenagers, you ask? Glad you asked. We already have platforms like Duolingo for language and Udemy for skill learning, but competitive analyses revealed that there is a lack of significant tools specifically on life skills for teens.
And as a former Psych major, I can affirm that any preventative measures taught during people's more malleable ages will help develop good patterns of behavior with longevity.
Maven's vision is to create a mobile app that equips teenagers with essential adulting skills. The goal is to provide not only resources and teaching, but also a community that helps keep the learners accountable.
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The first move I made was to post a poll on an Instagram story that asked the question:
What is a skill you wish you learned in school?
This yielded responses like budgeting, networking, open-mindedness, how to deal with breakups and more. Honestly, I was already anticipating these key words. The unexpected came to me from the teenagers themselves.
I started out with two goals for user interviews:
- To discover what adults wish they had learned in school
- To discover how teenagers liked to learn new information
I figured I'd recruit 2 groups of research participants: adults and teenagers.
My thought process was, since the app's curriculum would be focused around what adults find lacking in their lives, it would only be appropriate to ask them for the content--the what.
And since the audience is teenagers, I would need to know the methods in which they liked to learn as well as the types of apps they enjoyed--the how.
ROUND 1
So I moved forward with the interviews.
Adults were easy to find and recruit. I asked them questions around:
- What they wish they learned in school
- What they would want their kids to graduate high school being proficient in
The teenagers were the students from my work. I’m a teacher surrounded by them, so I used that to my advantage. I asked them questions regarding:
- The types of apps they enjoy
- How they liked to learn
The interviews went well (or so I thought). I even garnered insights like how a lot of teens prefer learning from real people in-person rather than from Youtube.
But I hit a rock when I sat down to create personas. Because my interviews focused on adult problems, I had no idea what my target users' (teenagers') goals or pain points were.
I realized I was trying to create a solution for teens using adult problems.
ROUND 2
I even considered creating 2 different categories of personas like I did with my research participants. But my team encouraged me to dive into another round of research with the goal of discovering teens' motivations and frustrations in learning environments.
Instead of interviews this time, I tried short-answer surveys. These were helpful because students had more time to think about their answers in less-pressure environments.
However.
I also added example responses within the survey questions to help students gain an idea of what I was asking for. But many students ended up picking from these examples. This resulted in skewed results that may have reflected my own assumptions.
Google Forms survey link: https://forms.gle/1Bp6ccwL16BPPuzq9
ROUND 3
They say the third time's the charm. I did a 3rd round of research. I made checkbox surveys this time, with detailed options based on what I learned from the first two attempts. These resulted in the most useful knowledge in achieving my research objectives.
Ultimately, all of the research was highly valuable, as each experience led to a more evolved strategy.
Google Forms survey link: https://forms.gle/wXuzj79nPX4AN8Mx7
After synthesizing the research, the following conclusions were made:
- The most important thing to most teenagers is connecting and socializing with friends, in addition to performing well in school.
- They prefer in-person learning from actual people rather than from a stranger on a video.
The second point surprised me. In an age where Tik-tok and Youtube reign, I thought teenagerss would prefer learning through videos and social media. It turns out they really value teacher-student connection when it comes to education.
The research ultimately led to these main ingredients:
- Academy - posts of videos and zoom rooms by instructors
- Books - a library of self-development reads
- Club - in-person meetups
- Social Media Feed - for posting small and large wins
- Chat - a virtual hangout
meet mikaela.
meet isaiah.
I relied heavily on iconography and visual cues to communicate possible courses of action. If there's anything I learned as a teacher, it's that kids don't read directions.
The decision to use muted neutrals punctuated by sparks of red was made for the sake of brand presence. I balanced it with solid white backgrounds and monochromatic illustrations, making sure colors and typography met the highest accessibility standards.
My main concern with low to mid fidelity iterations was creating a smooth flow in the process of navigating.
Selecting a topic will take them to a separate page dedicated to courses that relate to the desired theme.
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Here are some things that worked and didn’t work during usability testing, as well as some ideas for change.
WHAT WORKED
- Brand consistency; users could tell each screen belonged to the rest of the app
- Self-explanatory navigation bar, clear iconography
- There was always a way to navigate to a page, even it was via search bar
WHAT NEEDED WORK
- Some of the taxonomy didn't make sense when put into practice.
For ex, my initial term for social media feed was “explore.” Although it works for an app like Instagram, my users kept trying to use it to search course topics, which of course, wasn’t helpful.
- Books used to live in the Academy tab, and some users were confused about the difference between them. So I separated them into 2 tabs.
- Users weren't utilizing a navigation menu on the top of the home page, so I got rid of it and spread it all out in the main nav bar.
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As a designer, I was raw and semi-defined, and this was where I learned to listen for empathy, hone in on my common sense, and believe in my decisions as a designer.
This project was met with a lot of time and resource constraints. I had deadlines for each aspect of the process and I had to prioritize which features to flesh out.
I would also love for Maven to develop partnerships with schools to collaborate with school teachers and incorporate some of Maven's learnings into the curriculum. I can see how Maven's instructors could be guest teachers in classrooms and can offer great value towards schools' efforts to incorporate developments like social-emotional learning, which is a topic public schools have been trying to implement for some years now without being sufficiently equipped.
