COVID Resurgence Student Journeys
Project goals:
Understand the challenges, lived experiences, and real-world context of restarting school for at-risk and SPED populations in America.
Develop a set of interactive personas/scenarios/journeys for the students with the most significant challenges during the phases and formats of re-opening.
Collaborators:
Arthi Krishnaswami (lead), Serina Liu (illustrator), HappyFunCorp (UI design & engineering), Community Success Institute, Educating All Learners Alliance, Brooklyn Lab
Role:
Design research, service design, content & sketching
Timeline:
June-September 2020
The final interactive student journeys we created were intended to communicate a wide range of specific, challenging scenarios for diverse learners in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Covering varying environments, family conditions, economic standing, and interpersonal issues, we made sure to ground these scenarios in real, lived experiences as communicated to us through stakeholder interviews.
Our primary deliverable was a free online resource for teachers, administrators, families, and policymakers. I was responsible for the research, synthesis, sketching, and content development, alongside Arthi Krishnaswami. All final assets were illustrated by Serina Liu and the site itself was designed by HappyFunCorp.
Try it out for yourself below!
Meet the students.
At the core of the project, there were five student scenarios that we developed through extensive research, representing key challenges and creative solutions that we wanted to emphasize for educators and administrators.
In addition to the site, the content was also laid out in a print piece for people to follow the same student journeys in a booklet format. Visual design by Serina Liu.
Background research
At the start of the project, we did a deep dive into hundreds of pages of administrative resources and plans for reopening and/or resurgence in order to gain a comprehensive overview on the possibilities for the 2020-2021 school year. We also went through several mapping exercises to better understand the system.
You can find a full list of resources we referenced here.
Design strategy
After our initial research sprint, we determined that the guiding factors for this project would be:
Student at the center
Trauma-centered
Prioritizing human experience
Focusing on the story
Inclusive collaboration
Concept development
As we began to conceptualize a final intervention, I created a series of sketches to visualize the system of stakeholders and various ways to tell their stories.
The final concept we decided to pursue was an interactive form of storytelling, combining characters, their environments, and dialogue to communicate overarching issues. Below is the initial visualization I sketched to help guide our thinking going into user research and later, the content creation.
User research
Arguably the most critical part of our process was our user research, which consisted of stakeholder interviews, collaborative sketching exercises, and iterative feedback. Throughout the summer, we spoke with a wide range of experts, including special education teachers, a family engagement coordinator, an attendance teacher, and others from both charter and non-charter schools. We also had three subject matter experts adjacent to the team, whom provided us with feedback along the way.
Persona Development
Based on the insights we drew from our interviews (and with consistent feedback from our subject matter experts), we began to populate each students’ demographics, circles of influence, scenes, and dialogue. The sketches below show a few examples of how we began piecing together these components in order to flesh out each student journey.
Below you can find an example of the outline we put together for each student as we finalized the content.
Final Assets
Taking into account all of our interviews and feedback received from the field. we were able to develop a final cast of over 50 characters (each with a bio that can be found in the site) and 25 scenes to represent the five core student journeys.
All illustrations were created by the amazing, Serina Liu.
