Social Sphere - the social media educational platform

Project description

Garage2020 came with a concrete problem that we had to solve: "How can social workers relate and connect to the fast changing online world of youth?". We had to carry out the process of researching the needs of the users, their target group, and come up with a useful solution. Based on our findings, we set one main goal in the form of a research question: "How can we educate youth workers to connect more with the youth online?". Based on this objective, we created a concept for an educational platform, that will help youth workers learn how to be online and how to reach out to the youth through social media.

Context

Currently, a lot of youth centers in Eindhoven have trouble reaching out to the youth on the internet. Because the online world is continuously changing, it is a challenge for youth workers, especially older ones, to understand and connect to the young people with ease. This is why, the Municipality of Eindhoven is aiming to improve this situation and find a way to create a safe and reliable connection between the youth and the social workers. In order to do this, youth workers need to be present online and up to date with the latest platforms and trends.
Based on the given assignment and our set research question, we came up with the concept of an educational platform, that will help youth workers learn how to be online. This will benefit the users, as they will have a dedicated space where they can explore the world of social media and understand how they need to present themselves.

Results

For the past few months, we have been working on this project, going through various phases of development: Research, Design and Testing.
During the research period, we focused on collecting as much information about the topics of the project, being social media and youth work, and continued with our users and their needs. We collected all of the insights and made several documents, such as youth work in the Netherlands and other countries, most used social media platforms, the pros and cons of being online, different educational practices and the importance of being reliable and trustworthy. Conducting interview with youth workers in Eindhoven let us understand the current situation, what their motivations, obstacles and goals are. Based on those, we created personas and empathy maps that represent our target groups. Exploring these subjects provided us with general information about youth work and the online world and set the starting point of the concepting and designing phases.
The objective of the design phase was to create an interesting yet understandable look and structure of the educational platform. We went through several steps, in order to achieve our goal: conducting a competitive analysis, which helped us get inspired for our design and creating simple sketches and wireframes. During this phase, we also made a mood board and inspiration wall, which let us understand the aesthetic and feel of the product that we were going for. The last step was to create a brand style guide, leading to the final high-fidelity prototype.
The testing of our concept has been an ongoing process throughout the entire design phase. We managed to test our wireframes with our target group, receiving very positive feedback on the overall structure and idea of the platform. At the end, we also used various methodologies, such as “Think aloud”, “Task based test” and “Usability testing”, to validate our prototype. We conducted interviews with user and collected their feedback, upon which we iterated over our design. Putting our work to the test let us stay aware of our choices and continue to improve the look and structure of the platform. We have collected all of the insights into a Testing report.

About the project group

Our group consists of international and Dutch students from semester 6 and 7. We have been working in collaboration with the company Garage202 for the past few months. This task has been assigned to us by the Municipality of Eindhoven.