November 20, 2018
Digital Giving Team: Participatory Design and Usability Testing with Teens
Blog post written by Joyce Lu
The Digital Giving Team is spending this quarter looking at how EMAR can provide different forms of digital gifts to teens to help them relieve their stress. Earlier this month, we brought EMAR to 22 students at Garfield High School to engage teens in participatory design and get feedback on the usability of our prototypes with them. During our field visit, our goals were to gather:
- Teens’ feedback on a “Movie Clip” feature, including the interaction flows and content
- Teens’ ideas on other types of digital gifts
What is digital giving?
Under digital giving, EMAR would offer a non-tangible gift to students after they share their stress with EMAR. The goal for digital giving is to delight teens while helping them relieve their stress. When interacting with EMAR, our team came up with several digital gifts teens could receive gifts including:
- Music
- Movie clips
- Memes
- Inspirational quotes
- Games
A sketch depicting how students would interact with EMAR through digital giving (Image drawn by Nikita Kovalovs)
Movie clip prototype
We began by creating a prototype of our digital giving application. The prototype consists of a Google Slides slide deck, with buttons linking the slides together to simulate an interactive touch screen application. When using the prototype, teens can receive a digital gift in the form of a movie clip. First, the teen chooses whether they want to watch a movie clip of their choice, or a movie clip selected by another student. The movie clips are 30 seconds of a funny cartoon scene from their childhood. After watching the clip, the teen can choose to select a movie clip for the next person who interacts with EMAR.
A digital giving prototype allows teens to select a favorite movie clip to watch
Usability testing with teens
We then moved forward to testing our movie clip prototype at Garfield High School. We adopted the “Wizard of Oz” method where teens interacted with the movie clip prototype while we controlled it.
During our usability testing session with teens at Garfield High School, we collected valuable feedback including:
- Adding more options: Teens preferred to have more choices, including more choices of movie clips and more genres of movies
- Reducing activity time: Teens preferred to spend less time at the activity, most of them voted on 3-5 minutes
- Accepting teens’ suggestions: Teens appeared on board with having movie clips proposed by the student body
The Digital Giving Team interacting with teens at Garfield High School
Participatory design
While in the field, we invited teens to sketch their ideas of digital giving in a game scenario to engage them in design. Following our design prompt, students expressed their ideas in the form of cartoons.
Teens suggested other forms of digital gifts including:
- Nature puzzles: teens could put together a puzzle depicting a nature scene accompanied by soothing sounds found in nature
- Nature sounds: teens could connect their headphones to EMAR to listen to soothing sounds of the rain, waterfalls, or the ocean
A teen’s sketch of digital giving depicts a nature puzzle accompanied by soothing waterfall sounds
A Garfield High School student displays her sketch of a nature puzzle accompanied by soothing nature sounds
A teen’s sketch shows how a student could connect their headphones to EMAR to listen to a soothing audio clip
A Garfield High School student shares her sketch of a teen connecting their headphones to EMAR
Reflecting on working with teens
Being able to engage teens in design and collect valuable data is rewarding! This is the third participatory design session the Digital Giving Team has conducted during fall quarter. We appreciate gaining feedback from teens using quick prototyping and frequent tests while in the field. We will be visiting more schools to gather feedback in the following month, and can’t wait to share the next steps in our journey with you!
