At first, our group was all one big group: Glenn, Armando, Ciana, Bryce, and I. After interviewing many people (students, teachers, booster booth ladies, and more), and using post-it notes to sort out all the problems and complaints we heard into different arrangements, we realized that there were some big underlying causes for many of the problems at SAS: too much stress, not enough spirit, no way for the school to get feedback from their students, and students never knew what was going on at the school. 

It was at this point that our big group of 5 split up. Glenn and Armando decided to try and focus on aleviating the stress aspects of the problems, and as for our group (Bryce, Ciana, and I), we decided to focus on solving the stress problem from one of its main roots: a lack of effective communication. This also tied into the problems of spirit, feedback, and people not knowing what's going on. School spirit, even though it might not seem related to communication, does have a lot to do with it. If students don't know what spirit, club, and sports events are going on, and when, then how are they supposed to attend? We realized that we could solve many of these problems simultaneously, if we just found the right way to do it. 

So, we came up with the idea of making an app. We were inspired by the BBC news app, and wanted to model the homepage of our app in the same way. Instead of news headlines and plain white text, however, we wanted news to be presented in a flashy way, so that students want to read it. So, we decided to call the homepage the "advertising space". School spirit events, club events, sports events, and more could be posted here, with flashy image backgrounds (like a poster), and video links to go watch the promo videos for different events. We also wanted to put tabs for clubs, a calendar, colleges visiting, etc. At first, we wanted to put a feedback tab as well, where students can fill in a form and give feedback to the school. However, since we thought the app would be managed by students, we realized that many students may fill in the forms just to say offensive things. 

After surveying more people (students, faculty), we learned that more people wanted a website than an app. After talking to AJ about our app idea, we also realized that coding an app would be so much harder than we thought it would be, and it would take much longer than the amount of time we actually had. Also, it could be very expensive, it could be up to $5000. So, we decided to switch from our app idea to a website, and I made the prototype for it. We planned out our business plan and wrote it, and we were ready to present.

However, on the Friday before our business plan was due (it was due after that weekend, on Monday), we had a meeting with the communications office, to discuss our website prototype with them, how much the website would cost to make (we were worried that it could be up to $300 000), and who would run it. Let's just say.... we were very surprised. They showed us a link from the sas webpage to a site called "MY SAS" (yes, it just so happened to be the same name I gave our prototype website... and almost the same font), and we learned that they had basically already created a website that had the major components of ours. However, there was 1 problem. It was made for parents, not students. We decided to change our business plan, from creating a website to instead improving the MY SAS web page, and including a "Student" section in it. 

We decided to keep our home page advertising idea, so we replaced the calendar on the home page of the MY SAS webpage with the advertising space. We also replaced the tabs at the top with other links and pages that would be more useful to students, such as: Powerschool, Schoology, the Daily Bulletin, Calendar (the calendar that would usually be on the home page), clubs, colleges visiting, etc. However, we decided to keep the sports activities tab and the feedback tab. We wanted to keep the feedback tab this time because we realized the MY SAS students page would be more run be the school than the students, and any feedback given in that tab would be sent directly to the school, so less (or none) of the students would post offensive comments or trolls in the feedback. 

And so, we submitted our new idea and our new business plan, and presented it to the class on Tuesday. After all of our hard work, we felt like it had paid off, and our final result was a good reflection of it. 

Empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test

Following the steps of the design thinking process, me, Glenn, Armando, lily, and Ciana all set out with the goal of helping SAS. Our first round of interviews went well. We all got the answers we are looking for, but when we came back together we realized that the question we were asking promped everyone to talk about SAS in a negative light. So after redoing our questions we went out for a second round of interviews. We found two common themes: the lack of good comunication at SAS and that the students were generally very stressed, and thus caused the split in our group. Me, ciana, and lily went forward with the question how might we improve comunication at SAS? If I were to empathize a different way I would have had more unbiased questions so I wouldnt have to go redo interviews. In addition to this I interviewed a variety of students, teachers, admin, and Booster moms, but I could have gotten more of the admin and teachers to get a more in depth view of their perspective. 

So after the interviews we came up with the question How Might We Improve Communication at SAS? We realized this was a problem becuase many kids said they were overwhelmed with the number of platforms at SAS. They were, for the most part, uninformed about different events that the school holds (plays, club events, sports games) and the homework they had (schoology, email, google calendar). There are 18 different platforms SAS uses to talk with students and they are cumbersome to check every day. So the problem we identified was how do we make comunications between clubs, admin, and any general student information easier for SAS students to access. We did a very good jab making sure this was a real problem that people had by having 30+ interviews with a wide veriaty of staff and students. 

The next thing we had to do was Ideate with our problem in mind. We wrote down a long list of any ideas we came up with. I deas ranged from using the TVs that are all over the school, using the buletin boards, trying to get all the infomation onto one email, and many other things. out of all our options the best one was by far the idea of an app. This app would house all house events, club info, and a student calendar page. If I were to do this step again I would have prototyped more than one design idea becuase it wasnt a gaurentee that people would like the app. But with that being said when we went out and asked if they liked the app idea we got only positive feedback, so we had a strong idea that people liked what we were pitching them.

Prototyping and testing go hand in hand. Our first prototype was a cardboard phone with pull out papers that represented different tabs of the app. In hindsite we should have spent less time making the prototype and more time interviewing. After the first round of interviews we asked people if they liked the idea and if they would add anything. Everyone loved the idea or was neutral about it and we got suggestions to add schoology, lunch menue, and importent events. We added those to the papers in the original prototype, but as we tested more we realized people wanted a website more than an app. For the next stage of our prototype we desided to do a website made by wix. I made the first and very basic version of our website. We tested that and the biggest area of feedback we got was to make it more aesthetic. Lily made the website look better and when we went out to test it most people loved and and everyone else was neutral about it. It was ready to take to the comunications office. They loved the idea but already had a platform we could use, so the final product would be made on that. I think if I were to go back and redo the prototyping and testing phase I would try out a vider variety of prototypes, but the prototypes we used were efective in conveying our product. 

The project was a long and arduous process. I’ve never taken on a big project like this, so this was new for me. Not only was it a big project, but a group of 5 people, with 5 different opinions, 5 different ideas, and 5 different ways of thinking was a lot to handle. The original group was Me, Armando, Glenn, Lily, and Bryce. We were grouped together because we all had a common goal and that was to improve the lives of SAS high school students.

Our first objective was to "need find” or find what the students of SAS needed. All five of us went out and asked the students about their days and how they were. After we were done with interviews, the five of us came together to ideate major concerns or problems the students had. One problem we noticed was the lack of communication between students, staff, admin, support leaders, and teachers here at SAS. The SAS community seemed very confused as to where to get their information from. Our next step was to conduct more interviews. We asked students where they get their information about SAS from. The response we got back was a bit of a shock. After speaking to roughly 50 people, we discovered that SAS has a estimate of 18+ different platforms in which they communicate. This included: Facebook, email, Bulletin Boards, E-Bulletin, Snapchat, Instagram, several websites, and other platforms. This was concerning because the lack of communication lead to misinformed students, teachers, and admin.

The second problem we encountered was the amount of stress SAS high school students have. When speaking to students, most seemed frantic and had papers or a laptop sprawled in front of them. Most of the students were either studying for a test or finishing hw they didn’t have the ability to do at home do to fatigue from after school activities. Many students also complained about having tests back to back which put a lot of pressure on the students.

The next step to our process was finding the root of the problem, addressing it, and coming up with a solution. Due to the amount of responses we got about stress, we decided to focus our attention on this problem. To keep focused on solving the root of the problem we created the how might we statement “how might we mitigate stress here at SAS?”. Two very different ideas were produced from this statement. The first was to create a de-stressing room that would allow students to relax and get away from academic work. The second idea was to create an app that would allow students to find all of their information in one place. From these two ideas, one group turned into two groups. One focusing on the de-stressing room and the other into the communication app.

Being apart of the communication app group, I learned about programming and websites. The original idea was to create an app, but we didn’t know if the app would benefit the SAS community. Our next step was to create a prototype and present it to our audience to give them a visual representation of what the product would look like. Our first prototype was a sheet of paper with a drawing of a phone and a visual of what the app would look like. We then tested the prototype and most students and teachers liked the idea. Lily then upgraded our first prototype to a 3D model of a phone that held sheets of paper in it. You could pull out the sheets of paper, which represented someone pressing a tab on the app. After testing this prototype, we gained much insight about improving the app.

Next time, I believe it would be beneficial to view the process of creating an app and how much work it takes prior to ideating. My team was very excited about the app idea, that we didn’t look into how much effort creating an app would cost. Therefore next time, I believe it would be more beneficial to do research before we get ahead of ourselves. We later learned from YJ that apps are much more difficult than we anticipated. Luckily, based on our data, SAS students preferred websites to apps. Although coding an entire website was out of the option, YJ suggested we use a website template such as wix.com to present to the school that way there was a visual.

After creating and testing the website, we had to show the communications office our website and propose the idea of a student's website to them. They are in charge of the SAS website, so we knew they would be a big asset in making the website a reality. After we presented to the communication office, we learned that they had already been working on something similar to our website. The office had created a website for admin and parents, but had yet to create a website for the students. After proposing the idea, the office was ecstatic to work with us to make the website a reality. The next step was writing the business plan and presenting in front of the sharks. Both were nerve racking and not my favorite part. Writing and speaking are two of my biggest weaknesses and although i need to do them to improve, I also don’t want to.

Next time to improve on the overall process, I know now that reaching out and communicating with whoever you need to, is better done ahead of time. I also learned that you can never have too much data, in fact the more the merrier. I also learned that you need to research all the information behind an idea: Has this been done before? If so, how much did it cost? Did it work? Can we do it a different way? How can this benefit someone else? Is it a long term or short term product? How long will it take to create?... and a whole list of other questions. Always to be open to ideas, using the term “ yeas and”. Overall, I will use this as a learning experience to improve myself, creation process, and how I interact with others.