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My role:
Designer
Project type:
Class project
Timeline:
October 2023 - 2 weeks
Software:
Figma, Procreate, iMovie
Project summary:
Based on Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby’s notion of critical design, more specifically design fiction, a field focusing on the “what if” of the future and not “what now” of the present, I designed the first iteration of the social media app of the future. I chose to critique the academic grading system that I have experienced during my education. I believe that the emphasis teachers, peers, and society put on grades to define one’s self worth is unhealthy. As a response, I wireframed a social media app which takes this to the extreme, sharing student’s grades live with the rest of their class. Although this sounds like my worst nightmare, in reality, we aren’t that far away from it now …
"Design a provocative artifact that is meant to engage people through humor, insight, surprise, and/or wonder. Materialize unusual values in your object while considering the aesthetics of use."
The first step of this project was choosing the problem we wanted to combat. I chose the subject of my long-standing nemesis: grades.
Without strictly graded work until high school, receiving my first grades back on tests along with a GPA that could fluctuate with each homework assignment caused a not-so-positive shift in my perception of self-worth. And it wasn’t just me. The association student’s place on their grades equating to their self worth is a rising issue in a society that continues to increase academic pressure. This is the problem I chose to address.
The proposed solution:
As is the case with many design fiction projects, I chose to critique the issue by embracing the problem–-showing what the world may look like if nothing changes. I chose the form of a social media app because social media is one of the primary reasons teenagers suffer from lack of self esteem and anxiety. By merging the academic grading system with the dynamics of social media, "SeeMyGrade" underscores the increasingly negative effects of both social media and the grading system on students' mental well-being.
The audience:
This project is catered towards the existing target audience: middle school, high school, and college students (with an update to enable the app for elementary schools, as the pressure of grades is already starting to make its way towards defenseless 6-year-olds).
This was definitely not the most linear process, and I bounced back and forth between coming up with ideas and researching similar apps used today for student’s grades. As seen, some apps already implement similar competitive aspects, such as seeing where you place compared to the median grade in Canvas.
Inspired by the “competition” for this app, I sketched out the rough concept, using the features I had thought of while writing my proposal.
From this stage, I submitted the work I had done thus far, and waited for feedback from my professor and peers.
“I think the trick for this idea is to show how the app can impact people or change their behavior.” - Professor Derek Curry
“It would be cool to see how parents play a role in this app” - Classmate
With this feedback in mind, I created a wireframe, which would be my finished product for this project given the time constraint.
Lastly, in order to present this in class we needed to document the project in some way. I decided to film a video tutorial of this app, but in the context of a user who doesn’t see anything wrong with it. The following video is satirical and is meant to make the viewer question the ways our current society already enacts many of these troubling ideas.
I would hope that anyone who views this app prototype would reflect on the unhealthy pressure that the education system puts on students to be perfect. Furthermore, teaching kids that are still learning what is right and wrong that a number on an essay, problem set, or test defines them is questionable to say the least. I think that this is an important conversation that should be happening, and once it does it will lead to solutions for this system-wide issue.
During the week I was working on this project, I learned a tremendous amount. Starting the project, I had never used Figma or conducted any UX design project. This project made me excited to learn so much more about UX design!
In this project I:
- Defined a problem and proposed a design-fiction solution
- Researched competitor apps
- Created wireframes on Figma
- Learned to prototype on Figma
- Presented my project with video and PDF documentation