Amica – My Senior Project
Our product will help grade schoolers to understand the liability and responsibility of using different technologies. We aim to educate, engage, and prevent dangerous situations through interactive module programs on cybersecurity.
Problem Scope
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"Over 40 percent of children in grades 4 to 8 have been bullied online, and around 160,000 children are absent from school each day because of it.
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“Over 14 percent of high school students have considered suicide, and almost 7 percent have attempted it."
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Like their parents, kids have definitely jumped on the phone bandwagon, with the average age now for getting a first phone is 10.3 years old.
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Social media consumes kids today as well, as most score their first social media accounts at an average age of 11.4 years old.
This is the age where kids are first starting their online presence via social media, gaming, and other internet enabled services. Parents aren’t monitoring children’s online activity. Children need to know how to be safe online. With free and easy access the the internet nowadays, kids are exposed to cyberbullying, privacy threats, online predators, hidden fees, malware, harassment, mental health issues. Even if parents are monitoring their children, children need to learn how to protect themselves
Who do we sell to?
Selling to parents and decision makers at schools with purchasing power to buy new software and trainings for their schools, as well as teachers and policy makers. In the 2018-19 school year, 39,960,000 children enrolled in K-8th in the US. Schools will spend $681 billion on students, or $13,400 per student per year. Global investors have staked $8.15 billion in EdTech companies in the first 10 months of 2017.
Target demographic:
Principals
Teachers
School Executives
School Staff
Students in related fields
Computer professionals
Lawyers
CIE Advisors
School Software Salesperson
Research Findings
In most school districts today (CA), every student gets a chromebook starting in K or 1st grade
Most students get cellphones in 7th grade, elementary does allow them though
Not too many incidents of cyber abuse in elementary, but spikes in Jr. High and High School
The main program being presented right now is Cyber Citizenship, but most individuals agreed it was not super effective or communicate issues properly
Every individual we talked to had a concern about current generations and technology
Many parents are not properly informed or do not understand technology which makes this issue difficult
User Archetype
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Joey Carter, 11, Student
Joey just moved to San Luis Obispo from LA this past year. His parents got him a smart phone so that he can stay connected to his friends back in LA. He recently made an Instagram and Snapchat so that he can talk to his new friends in SLO and old friends in LA. He enjoys riding his bike, going on hikes, and playing Minecraft on his dad's computer
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Amy Gonzales, 43, Director of Education Technology
Amy has a long career in education, starting with 10 years as a high school math teacher, then eventually a middle school vice principal. At all three levels, Amy utilized technology to better her students and staffs experience in the classroom. She was then promoted to oversee the use of technology throughout the district.
Competitive Analysis
Digizen
The Digizen website provides information for educators, parents, carers, and young people. It is used to strengthen their awareness and understanding of what digital citizenship. It shares specific advice and resources on issues like social networking and cyberbullying. Has the ability to view the site as a teacher, parent, or student.
McAfee
McAfee has just made an online role-playing game that teaches kids how to stay safe in the digital world. Sends kids on a mission to secure stolen top-secret documents using multi-factor authentication. This product would not really be something classroom ready. Although it is captivating and fairly easy for kids to use, there is no lesson plan or clear curriculum being taught.
Cyberwise
CyberWise is a resource site for BUSY grownups who want to help youth use digital media safely and wisely.Since this site is targeted to adults, classroom implementation might be difficult. Their presentations and workshops are geared toward adults. And the company comes and presents these presentations in an “assembly” like way. So there is no long term curriculum.
Product Development
How do we effectively teach young children about cyber safety and cyber security? Gamifying became the optimal solution pretty quickly because after the first few interviews, the immediate feedback received is that kids in the elementary to Jr. High School age range would be much more interested and would learn more from a game than an online classroom or reading material. In addition the main competitor that's already made their way into classrooms, Common Sense Media, is known to only really have reading materials which have been reported to be ineffective in our interview by all parties.
Strategy:
In person workshops, but have online training for the individuals who would teach it.
Make an online shelf that schools could move around and customize, but would be comprised of online tests, and reading materials.
Gamify the lessons for the kids by creating interactive modules.
Content Development
Designing game mockups ahead of time was essential because it would help the developer team understand what would be needed to build the game. In the case of the business team, the mockups were needed to help describe and show customers the vision of the product and allow space for feedback. Below are renderings of the designs we created:
User Interviews
We want to motivate our user to recognize online bullying tendencies and help them feel confident in their ability to take a stand. With the cyberbullying module we are creating, we want to show the user the positive impact speaking up for the victim might have.
To research how we might format and build the content, we interviewed multiple individuals including a high school girl who has experienced cyberbullying firsthand. In the future, we plan to create more modules based on real experiences from real people that could be found through interviews, and stories online. Interviewing this girl has led us to create scenarios that evoke emotion and help our users feel empathy which we feel will help teach many of the main lessons in our modules. With real people, it is our intention to make the situations feel genuine and not hand crafted.
Example Questions:
Do you believe this product would work?
How has bullying affected you?
How have you grown from bullying?
What should your peers and the school done differently?
Why do you think people bully?
In what ways do you think technology has enabled bullying?
In what forms do you see the most bullying?
Task Flow
I began designing the module by sketching out how I wanted the scenarios to play out. Similar to the Bandersnatch model, I want to guide the user through a story and give them the choice to drive where it goes. This model will give the user options to be a bully, bystander, or friend/ individual to stand up. Each of these roles take different paths throughout the story all while ultimately leading the user to want to hopefully want choose to be a friend who can stand up for bullying.
Visual Design
At the base of our brand we created a drawing of a koala. This koala will be prominent through all of our modules. The logic behind using animated characters like koalas in our design is meant to give our users a sense of comfort and familiarity as they navigate through sensitive topics. According to an essay on film studies and child development, imagination is an important aspect in children development. When children watch an animation, they will relate themselves with the character in the animation. Their personalities are being influenced by the the character
Design concepts created for our website all involved bright colors and vibrant vector based images. Children tend to be attracted to the bright block colors of the color wheel rather than pastels or muted blends based on previous research from television cartoons and children's toys. Primary colors red, yellow and blue, and secondary colors green, orange and purple, are more appealing than light shades of pink and beige or neutral shades of gray and brown. Doctors understand that color affects emotions, and can have a significant effect on developing children. Warmer colors like orange and yellow bring happiness and comfort. For this reason, our landing page and password module incorporates orange color palettes.
User Flow
To translate the actual design for the Dev team, I created a flowchart that labeled the order of each designed screen. I also uploaded and created folders for every graphic, button, and text in a Google Doc. In each folder there were screenshots of every designed screen with labels.
Senior Expo and Usability Tests
The senior project expo was a great opportunity for our group to showcase everything we worked on for Amica, and even demo our project to our users. The team showed up in matching colored shirts with black Amica name tags to show some team spirit
With everything on display for people to see, our team members stood by our table and took time to pitch our company to interested people, as well as have individuals sample our demo on the laptop. We explained who we were, our goal, and how we obtained our goal. Our biggest attraction was our clickable demo. With the password game, we were able to have people physically experience what one of our typical users would while playing the game and were also able to see how a large amount of individuals reacted to our game. While people were testing out the demo we noticed some a few patterns. We were able to catch errors, notice patterns in people’s choices, as well as get feedback on the usability.
Results
A few people noticed that some buttons weren’t clicking correctly. This was an easy fix, but it was useful for us to see and keep perfecting the demo. Another pattern we noticed was which buttons people are drawn to first. Our game involves clicking and dragging letters, punctuation to the middle of the screen. These letters and punctuation are inside of yellow or orange shapes. Most people tended to want to drag the yellow circles before the orange squares. What was interesting about this was that the circles were above the squares on the screen which showed that people tend to rely on visual hierarchy when making decisions. This is a good piece of information to note when designing more websites in the future. If we wanted our users to tend toward a certain button, we would want to incorporate design hierarchy when thinking about user decisions. Yellow and orange buttons the users had to click and drag to create their unique passwords.