Describe the problem in less than 3 sentences, explaining the what, why, who, how of the problem. Mash together two ideas and create a catchy slogan that sums up your ideas.
Our problem was finding the balance of a functional yet visually appealing physical and electronic planner that would be beneficial for students. This was a problem that we as students have faced due to the vast differences and preferences in planner choices for students here at our school. We believe that creating a functional planner for all students was of high priority as it may drastically affect a student’s organization and grades.
‘Design your life.’
^These are two of the cover designs that customers could choose from in order to customize their own planner to their taste What is the vision and mission of your solution?What is the vision and mission of your solution?
What is the vision and mission of your solution?
By the end of our process, we wanted to develop a planner that suited everyone at our school’s needs. Firstly, everyone needs to be satisfied with the cover and insert design, so we made different covers that people could choose from that suited their liking. Also, we made two prototypes with different insert layouts to suit different people’s needs on how they like to visualize their week/month.
We also wanted to create a planner that was both easy to use and something people would actually want to use on a day to day basis to plan out their week/month. We believe that if an organization system works, then the person would be motivated to keep using that system to help them stay on top of things. We wanted people to keep using our planner, so we made many different designs and organization styles to hopefully be able to suit a broad range of people’s needs.
We were able to do this by firstly interviewing people before we started making our prototype and using that data to create a planner style accordingly.
Who are the stakeholders? What will be the impact your solution make to them?
The stakeholders and people we planned to serve were pretty much only HKIS High School students and the parents of those students. We wanted to help the high school students by having an organized system that keeps all their homework assignments together and give the parents a copy of the planner to help them know the dates of any important school events. This way, both students and parents can be aware of what’s going on at school.
As stated before, we wanted our impact to be positive. We wanted to help students get better grades in school by being able to remember and do all of their formative homework assignments. We also plan on positively impacting HKIS parents by letting them know the dates of school events, in turn allowing them to be more connected to their kids and the school community itself.
Review the possible solutions, rate and analyze the pros and cons of each of them.
During the design process, we came up with many solutions. Though all of them had their benefits, they also had their downsides.
1) Having a customizable cover
Instead of having a plain or generic cover design, some students wanted to have something that was good to look at. In other words, they wanted something that made the planner feel like its theirs and that its suited to their style. We thought that this was actually a very important aspect of designing planners because for some people, having a pretty planner would help to motivate them to actually want to use it on a day to day basis.
Solution(s) to solve this request:
One of the solutions we came up with in order to solve this problem was having simple blank cover but have a plastic pocket as the cover. This way, the blank sheet of paper could be a good cover design for people who prefer a minimalistic style. We incorporated the plastic pocket as the cover so people could actually design their own covers for the planer. All they had to do was design their cover onto a sheet of paper and scale it down to size before slipping it into the pocket. This way, people could have an infinite amount of designs that suits their style.
Pros: There will be an infinitely large number of possible designs, and people won’t be limited to the cover designs that we provide them with.
Cons: Making the plastic pocket would require it to be a spiral bound planner, which is much harder to make compared to a simple staple bound planner.
2) Electronic vs Paper planning
Solution(s) to solve this request:
Since we live in the modern technological day and age, there will be people who like to use electronic planning as well as people who like to use the traditional, paper planning. In order to try and meet everyone’s needs, we decided to make a paper planner as well as an electronic to-do list that was coded by Mia.
Pros: The online to do list was very simple and easy to use
Cons: The to do list had no dates, so some people may not like that.
3) Planner inserts that would work for everyone
Solution(s) to solve this request:
Another issue that was brought up by people when we initially interviewed them was the issue of the actual inserts for the planner. We sought to solve this problem by incorporating both weekly and monthly inserts into the planner. This way, we could cover people who prefer a monthly view, people who prefer a weekly view, and people who like to have both at a glance.
We also decided to make the weekly inserts have the school organized events pre-printed onto them, so students wouldn’t have to copy it down themselves.
Pros: We can help people who have a broad range of preferences: monthly, weekly, and both.
Cons: If we add all inserts together into one planner, people who don’t need all of them may find it thick and bulky to carry something around that they won’t even end up using.
What are the potential challenges you may face?
Something that obviously was difficult to overcome was trying to find a balance for those people who like to use both an electronic and paper planner. Since paper doesn’t sync with technology, people may have to write things twice since the two planners wouldn’t sync together so that they could see everything at a glance at either one.
Another challenge that all of us faced was the development of the electronic planner. Since all of us (except Mia) had little or no knowledge about coding, it was hard for us to try and develop a system for online planning. Even our end electronic planner product was extremely simple and was more functional than it was visually since we didn’t quite have the skill to make it more visually appealing.
Tasks to complete the solution and possible prototypes you can make.
Since our planner was designed to suit HKIS high school students and parents, we decided to survey high school students and parents as well as take note from the current student planner in use and looking for planner layouts on the web.
Based on the information gathered from all three of our sources, we began to try and mix that information to create our own prototype. We did this by making an extremely rough draft of the layout freestyle. We drew this by hand as a placeholder and reference whilst other members copied the layout onto the computer so we could print it out later.
Obviously we couldn’t get a very clear idea of what the real product would look like just by looking at the rough drafts, so we decided to print some of the inserts as well as get Weilyn to do some calligraphy in order to actually get a very specific idea of what the end product would look like. After creating some more cover designs that more people could choose from, we decided that we were satisfied with our end product.
Come up with something you can test and prototype. Break it down into small pieces.
In the end, we came up with two things that we could test and prototype—our paper and electronic planner(s). With the electronic planner, we tried to make it to the best of our ability, whilst we modeled the paper planner off what our students and parents said they wanted.
We decided to create a solution to all the problems stated above and combine all of their thoughts into one conveniently held end product. We ended up basing a lot of our paper planner off of what students thought, such as having both weekly and monthly layouts since students liked both, increasing the size of the homework boxes since students complained that they didn’t have enough space to write their homework, and making it customizable since students wanted to be able to enjoy looking at and using their planner.
In order to measure our level of success and accuracy with our planner, we had to conduct another survey to see if there were any improvements before and after creating our prototype.
Once again, we went around the school to survey more students. Overall, the feedback was positive and an improvement could be seen. People said that they would actually consider investing in and using our planner, but there were still bits that we could improve on. For example, people said they liked the multitude of cover designs that they could choose from, but wanted to see some designs that also would appeal to boys. Since we were an all girls group, I guess it never crossed our minds to incorporate something that guys would like because we didn’t know what planner layout they would like.
Here are the results of our survey:
Overall, this short project was a great experience to have some hands on action on something that I was passionate about—planners and planning. This was an interesting project that opened my eyes to more perspectives from other people regarding how they plan and how they different from my methods of planning.
UPDATE:
1. Summary of your testing results
Through our conclusive test results, we found that our planner is an improvement from what the school had before this. Students didn’t like how there wasn’t enough space in their planners to fully write down ALL of their homework (presumably because they had a lot of HW) and how they didn’t like the design of the planner cover and inserts since it looked to bland for their tastes. In my opinion, we were able to solve 75% of this problem. We were able to fully resolve the issue of making the insert sheets more user friendly, but we weren’t fully able to resolve the cover design issue. Since we didn’t interview many boys, it didn’t cross our minds to ever make more gender neutral or masculine covers. Overall, I believe we did a great job in improving student planners in the short amount of time we were given but we still have a long road to go in order to really make it beneficial for virtually all students at this school.
By the end of this project, I felt a strong pay off. I felt extremely proud since I was able to improve something for others that I had originally taken for granted. In the end, the quality of our work also paid off. After interviewing the ladies at the dragon shop who were parents of students themselves, Amber (store manager?) said that she was impressed with our work and would consider printing out and selling our planners for high school students here at HKIS in the store if we kept working on and improving our product at our current rate.
2. Answer this question..“What does Design Thinking process have to do with programming?”
I believe that one of the main objectives of programming is to solve a problem. In order to solve a problem, you firstly need to able to identify and know what that problem is. Without knowing what the problem is, you obviously won’t be able to solve it.
After identifying the problem comes developing strategies and processes in order to try and solve the problem. You have to try and think outside of the box in order to come up with original solutions that don’t already exist in order to solve your problem. In my opinion, this is the hardest part of the design process since there is an infinite process of trial and error. In order to see if those solutions are pragmatic, you have to test them many times. Testing your prototype may deem it a fail, so you have to repeat the process until you get a solution that works and you’re happy with.
3. Create three:
“I can..” statements from this process
I can empathize with people and identify they’re problems.
I can use the process of design thinking to create a functional and beneficial prototype.
I can interpret feedback and constructive criticism positively and realize that it is key in the steps leading to further improvement.
