Encouraging Children and Teens to Continue Studying during COVID.
Junior Achievement, Accenture
Overview
As COVID-19 spread in Brazil, numerous businesses closed, resulting in widespread job losses, while children began leaving school due to the suspension of classes and the growing need to contribute to their families' financial support.
Year
2020
Goals
Educate the NGO children and teens on the long-term benefits of completing their education.
Roles
UX Designer
UI Designer
Platform
Desktop and Mobile web
The problem
During the pandemic, the closure of shops, schools, and restaurants led to widespread layoffs, leaving many professionals unable to support their families. When schools initiated online classes, many students did not return.
Reports from UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) highlighted that interruptions in education for children and teenagers can result in disengagement and difficulties in returning to basic education. These reports indicate that children and adolescents often take informal jobs to support their families.
In response to this issue, Junior Achievement (JA) initiated a project aiming at engaging and educating minors about the importance of completing their basic education.
Organizing the problem
As a Kickstart on the project, I started secondary research based on stakeholders’ knowledge, education statistics, hypotheses, and ideas on creating an engaging solution for this problem.
This matrix helped me separate and organize what the team knows for sure (certainties), what are ideas and assumptions (under assumptions) and what are the questions that still need to be answered (Doubts)
After thorough review and inputs from education experts and operations acting on JA, the team divided the assumptions and ideas considering the project timeline (6 months) and voted on them considering the following criteria: value to end users (children and adolescents), feasibility, and confidence over users adoption.
As an outcome of this workshop, high management JA stakeholders defined a board game as the output of this project.
Benchmark Analysis
Considering our products goal of educating and engaging students I looked for other references of educational games and pin point the best part of their experiences. I looked into four criteria: value proposition, characteristics (board game, navigation style, single player x multiplayer, etc), positive aspects and negative aspects.
Protopersonas
In a workshop with stakeholders, we defined protopersonas to help us empathize with children main pain point throughout their journey on education.
Key Experiences
Once we had personas well defined and aligned the information and expectations on how the game would work we started defining the main experiences the game should provide to engage and meet a good UX Experience.
Players must be able to comprehend and access the hame rules rapidly and intuitively.
The game must keep players engaged and entertained (fulfil good game play heuristic).
Performance and progress should be able to to track at all times.
The Player must be able to add, edit and remove personal information in the platform.
Player must be able to understand when they collect points, loose points, level up and when the game is over.
The Player must be able to save the game and return to the same state subsequently.
Ideation
Communication Guidelines
One of the business definitions we had for the game was that users needed to be logged in to play and collect points that would later be useful in the NGO daily routine. For that we designed a communication rule to map all e-mails that would need to be sent to users.
User flow
Since we wouldn’t have enough time to do wireframes, considering the project deadline, I designed a user flow to map the game navigation and help defining stories.
Moodboard
To collect inspiration on visuals I also created moodboards. These also supported us on iterating in the user flow since to collect them I was also navigating through different games user flows.
Solution Design
Three difficulty levels
At the beginning of the game, the player is introduced to the context and can choose a character to be their avatar. The game is divided into three levels: Elementary School, High School, and College, where players face many challenges until graduation.
“Day to day” squares
Once a player falls on that square they can be led to a life-challenging situation that can lead you to start work and study or not. If they opt to start working they'll see an increase of difficulty into getting points and going to the next level.
Leave work option
If they choose going to work and study they can "leave work” after a few rounds and go back to school where they'll see they will get points faster.
Usability Testing
To validate the solution's usability and identify new opportunities, I conducted a moderated usability test with 5 children nominated by the NGO.
Learnings from UT
Users pointed out feeling a lack of progress while playing the game. Despite perceiving an increase in difficulty while playing, they found having the same visuals all along to be demotivating.
“ I like the game, but when I go to the next phase it's the same thing, the same board, no song, it can be a little boring over time” (Caio, 11 years old)
Musical stimulation was perceived as an important asset for marking key game milestones, such as winning or losing a round, completing the game, and even serving as background ambiance.
“ I think having a song is missing here, I play several games and there is always something that I am listening to in the background and it's fun.” (Eduardo, 9 years old)
Users enjoyed the game and its social aspect. They appreciated the opportunity to learn about experiences different from their own, which they found both fun and engaging. They also liked the ability to choose a character they could relate with.
“ I liked picking a character, I chose Brenda because I think I am like her, I like selling brigadeiros at school and making things by myself.” (Thais, 9 years old)
“I like the game, there are stories that I can relate to, and some of them I could never imagine, I think it's nice to learn about it.” (Carolina, 13 years old)
Style guide
How did we measure success?
Given our goal of educating the NGO's children and teens through our solution, defining tangible success metrics was difficult. Instead, we chose to measure the children's perception of the value of education before and after playing the game. To achieve this, we utilized two questionnaires that were forwarded to children from two JA units—one before and one two weeks after the game launch.
The surveys included a mix of open-ended questions and rating scales, where participants indicated their level of agreement with several statements. We received 87 responses to the pre-launch questionnaire and 71 responses to the post-launch questionnaire. The key findings were as follows:
I wish I didn't have to go to school anymore.
85% of respondents didn't agree with this sentence before launch, and that number grew to 88% on the post-launch survey.
I believe school is important for my future.
91% of respondents rated 4 out 5 for this sentence before launch, and after the number grew to 96% considering the same criteria.
Outcomes and expansion
The game was considered a success by the NGO stakeholders which lead to its expansion to 6 countries and translations to Spanish and English
Learnings
Game design can be quite challenging because it pushes you out of your comfort zone. Unlike solving a specific problem, the focus is on creating engagement. In this project, I believe the most important skill I developed was designing for engagement.
When I first started this project I didn't have much experience with illustration, designing scenarios, boards, and interactions overall that need to be visually appealing helped me evolve my skills
