Let’s Get to Work: Finding Inspiration and Defining Our Audience
Camryn Garza, Jennifer Castillo, Lisette Lopez and Kayla Johnson
Hello! We are Adultly and here to help people transition from “pre-adulthood” to full-blown, independent adults.
After framing our initial design question, it was time to start our research and inspiration phase. The first step of the process: creating a plan. Our team continues to rely on Trello to coordinate our progress and action steps.
As part of our inspiration phase, Camryn went on a hunt to find digital apps that help users with task management. We were interested in how apps create milestones for their users to achieve their goals. Initially, we looked to apps that were structured as “one-stop shops” for users to manage different tasks, but we were worried that this model would overwhelm our audience given the nature of our project.
Thus we had to switch gears a little and turned to our sources for help.
Next, we conducted interviews. We cast a big net to social workers, career coaches, nonprofits, and video game designers. We discovered through our interview with social work student Claudia Roman that social workers find and share resources through word of mouth, and through Ashley Nash, Moody Career Coach, we realized we needed to create a hands-on learning environment through a digital tool.
We wanted to draw inspiration from an unexpected place so we met with an associate professor at UT and a video game animator, Ben Bayes. We inferred that we could adopt similar methods game designers use to engage or immerse their users into the games. From our interview with Ben, we came to a three-step conclusion: develop our product/user knowledge, test product/user skills, then interview and improve based on feedback.
We created a mass survey to send out to our social networks, asking them to rate their confidence on various topics: housing, taxes, budget planning, etc. With a total of 96 responses, four have expressed interest in participating in a focus group, where we will do in-depth interviews to understand their needs and patterns of behavior. This is something we are incredibly proud of!
Now with the information, we can finally get to the fun part! We know now that we want our prototype to be as engaging and interactive as possible, and we’re excited to see how all of this pulls together!
