A tablet app empowering secondary students to discover, learn and practice design
Rookie
The Challenge
Design a tablet app for high school students (ages 13+) to #DiscoverDesign.
Provide a source of inspiration
Encourage job exploration
Discover what design is
Award
Amazon X Creative Jam LIVE Honourable Mention
Role
Design Thinking
UI/UX Design
Prototyping
Timeline
1.5 week (2020)
Tools
Adobe XD
Illustrator
Team
Lulu Li
Christina Poon
The Solution
Introducing Rookie
Discover relevant design disciplines
Exploring design fields based on students' existing interests
Account Sign-up
Engaged Learning
Students complete learning activities in order to unlock and view projects in different areas of design
Unlocking design disciplines
Find out what's really out there
Under each design discipline section, curated case studies will provide students the opportunity to be inspired by real-world applications
Browse case studies
Learn how to do it
Under each design discipline section, relevant tutorials, quizzes and resources will be available for students to recreate the projects that inspire them the most.
Design tutorials
Concept Development
In a Google Doc, we copied key objectives from the design brief and began to write down questions that would help us determine our project objectives.
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How do high school students interact best with technology?
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Will young users use the app themselves, with their peers, friends, parents, or mentors?
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How can we create an experience that gets high school students excited about the design field and potential careers in design?
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What made us interested in design as individuals who enrolled in a high school design program?
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What design-based platforms currently exist? What do we like and what do we think is missing?
How we did it.
Communication Tools
Zoom
Facebook Messenger
Google Jamboard, Drive, Doc
Flow chart
From our competitive analysis we identified features that fit with our objectives and implemented features/content that were missing.
Rookie provides 4 main ways to explore content:
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For you: customized feed displaying case studies from multiple design disciplines
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Design disciplines: feed tailored to one design discipline (e.g., UI, UX, wayfinding, 3D modelling, motion, etc.)
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Innovation: featured case studies with social, political, or technological impacts
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Moodboards: collection of case studies and/or tutorials selected by the user
Discover Design
Pros:
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Challenge and reward system allow students to practice design skills
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Every challenge has a explanation section where the design process is explained
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Users can see student and professional work
Cons:
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Hard for user to learn about a discipline, discipline is not explained
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Poor visual identity
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Heavily text-based
Behance
Pros:
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Reward systems (appreciations + views + comments)
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Well-organized feeds filtered by discipline, tool used, location, colour, schools
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Interactive live streams from creators, lets users see different types of creative processes
Cons:
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Targeted towards all age-groups, how can we make a platform intended for the youth and their ethnography?
Lowfi Wireframes
After establishing our flow chart, we spent 15 minutes to independently sketch how these pages might look like in our application. After the 15 minutes we came together to discuss our findings and continued to iterate the sketches as a group.
Other projects
Reflection
Working on Rookie on a tight 1.5 week deadline during our school semester was challenging yet rewarding. Juggling working between the design challenge, school courses, and work, my team and I learned an important lesson: maintain communication and accountability among teammates. We made sure to organize meetings around peoples' availability and kept each other updated on the progress of our independent tasks.
For the future:
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Develop ways for students to work together
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Incorporate badges & reward system
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Include mentors to provide students with encouragement and feedback
Collect inspiration
Students can save their favourite case studies and tutorials, generating a database of inspiration.
Moodboards
Design System
A rounded typeface and playful colours create a fun and inviting interface for young users. Buttons follow a grayscale when inactive to reduce visual noise in the interface.
Illustrations
Characters were created to support learning in a fun and engaging way for the youth. Abstract characters ensured we didn't present designers as looking a specific way – anyone can be a designer!
Competitive Analysis
After having a better understanding of what kind of product we were developing, we researched what design-based platforms currently exist. What do we like and what do we think is missing?