A few years ago, I had the opportunity to interview for an IXD job at Google. I was given a design challenge in a later interview round chose to work on this prompt:
Design an experience to help an educator match faces to names, with the goal of shortening the time needed to reach complete un-aided accuracy.
Working with a Sample Use Case
Ms. Mallon is a grade school teacher who needs help remembering names quickly because it helps to build relationships. She has 150 students over the course of the school year and it's challenging for her to remember the students names within the first few weeks. Her goal is to help create a more welcoming environment for her students by learning their names as quickly as possible.
Assumptions
The main assumption is that there is a need for an additional memorization technique. I'll work with these hypotheses to validate this idea:
1. Teachers want a new way of learning students names.
2. Teachers need a quicker, more intuitive way of remembering names to reach un-aided accuracy.
Learning About the Audience
As defined in the design prompt, the target market for the experience is teachers. To get a sense of how teachers currently deal with placing many faces to names and help validate the assumptions, I reached out to a sample set of seven teachers. This would help expose the opportunities on which this new experience could be focused. I created a survey and recruited some participants who represented the target audience. Here are four key Themes from the feedback:
1. Making associations is important
2. Teachers have their own strategies to help them learn names
3. Many teachers have technology in their school systems where student information is accessible
4. Teachers use common memory linking strategies such as repetition and name games
Approach to Crafting a Solution
Now that the cornerstones of the experience were defined, another question arose. What technological solution would be the best approach? I decided on a mobile app which is available to teachers at all times and helps them to speed up the learning process.
Armed with the key insights from the research, I put pencil to paper. I started by writing out the initial flow and then sketched it out. I had a general idea of what features I wanted to integrate. There needed to be a way of importing student information and viewing student profiles at the very least. There also needed to be additional methods to aid memorization. These main features would be the cornerstones of the experience.
App Flow
Sketching out options for the Associations interactions
Early sketches included a Seating Chart feature, which I later removed.
Lean Testing and Iteration
Many teachers used different games to help them learn names. Based on this feedback, I decided to use a quiz/gaming approach as the main feature of the application. After the initial sketches were mapped out, I showed my sketches to some of the respondents. Most of the feedback was positive, and one teacher who was resistant to technological methods of name memorization warmed up to the app idea.
Making Visual and Verbal Associations
Reinforcing the Associations
Conclusion
It was so much fun to work on this project. I learned a lot about how teachers interact with students in the classroom environment. This was particularly interesting because a lot has changed since I was a grade school student! Other areas that may be worth exploring could include challenging other users in the quiz, customizing verbal and visual associations, features to aid pronunciation or better integration with current school systems.
This is a product that can be useful not only in the classroom setting, but in many other industries as well. It could be used for conferences, in sales, business meetings, or any situation where knowing names in advance would be greatly beneficial.
P.S.
I was nearly 30 weeks pregnant with my second child during this interview process. It was awesome, but exhausting!
