Teen Squad is a project that was created during the Women Who Code Hackathon. Over the course of 2 days, the team created the concept of developing an e-counseling peer to peer platform for teens ages 13-18. The goal of the platform is to allow for teens to be able to find volunteer activities, get recommendations from teachers, leaders, and others in their social / community group, get tutoring from their peers and allow for them to ask questions that they may feel uncomfortable asking an adult. Through this platform, they will be able to navigate their education, gain mentors and have their résumé digitally built during their high school years.
The problem that we had to solve was how to design in a way that will keep teens engaged and increase their engagement in using the app, how will we keep them safe and make sure they are not talking to adults posing as their peers, and how can we make it easy for them to use.
Mobile First
As there are more cell phones owned by teens than desktop computers, I decided that it would be best to start with a mobile app. The business requirement was that the tone and look would have the same feeling that teens could associate with MTV and Adult Swim. This will give them a tone they feel comfortable and familiar with but can also relate to. MTV and especially Adult Swim tend to use simplistic styling, dark yet neutral color schemes with a few lines or words of text.
Gamification
With the increasing number of users,especially teens playing mobile games, a gamification aspect will not only increase their engagement but also reward them for their time spent during volunteering and community services. This will also help them to build relationships, network and gain recommendations that can be stored on their profile.
Future features: Desktop
Due to the short amount of time along with the data we received, the team and I decided it would be best that the desktop version of Teen Squad would be a later feature. The feedback that we gained from parents and teachers showed that the desktop version would be utilized more so by them being able to submit recommendations, track the teens' progress for courses and to get updates about volunteer opportunities in their area.
You can check out the mobile prototype here
You can check out the mobile prototype here
