mathplus Service Design Guide by Will Millar

math plus

mathplus SERVICE DESIGN GUIDE

Contents

Intro/The Team

1 The Problem

The Assignment

Audience

Competitive Analysis

2 Our Approach

Initial Strategies

Intense Iteration

Proposed Service

Functionality

3 Creative Execution

Visual Identity

Narrative User Scenario Video

mathplus is a service for math-inclined students who have little or no direction in their career path. The service helps first inspire high school and college students by introducing them to various applications of mathematics in different disciplines. Then mathplus can help connect to the professional world with a system to set up meetups, video chats, and send messages. We feel that these real connections and thoughtfully curated media can efficiently give students a true sense of a career path.

6â&#x20AC;&#x192;MATHPLUS

The Team

Will Bruno

Will Millar

Nellie Kaiser

Jeremiah Louf

Research Service design Creative direction Art direction

Research Service design Creative direction Art direction Copywriting Video production Service design guide

Research Service design Creative direction Art direction

Research Service design Creative direction Art direction Copywriting

Service Design Guideâ&#x20AC;&#x192; 7

Photograph “Final Exam” by dcJohn. 2005. flic.kr/p/7BVsM.

PA R T 1

The Problem U.S. high schools average 1 guidance counselor for every 450 students.

The Assignment Identify a target social group who is underserved in the digital marketplace. Based on demographic and ethnographic research, develop a proposal for a prototypical digital service designed to meet a specific need of your target. Adapted from Brian Lucidâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Design Research: Service Design Project at Massachusetts College of Art and Design

Audience Choosing a target audience was one of the most critical steps in the process, and it was the first decision we made in the project. Personal Experience

Target Demographic

In the group’s first meetings, brainstorming sessions, we found ourselves largely drawing on personal experience when citing examples of demographics, user needs, and other potential topics. Our roles as students, family members, and neighbors stuck out as topics of further investigation. We also made sure to consider social groups that we were not necessarily a part of, particularly “empty nest-er” parents, because we had a service ideas that might be interesting for them. However, at the end of the day, we ended up feeling that students were our best choice. We are very familiar with all the systems at play in students’ lives, and we have several ideas for areas of improvement for the student experience.

We chose to target students from junior year of high school to sophomore year of college, so roughly ages 16 – 22. This is when the pressure is on students to start finding what they want to do in life. All of a sudden, after years of being instructed what to do and where to go, they are often thrown into a whole heap of selfinitiated life decisions. Traditionally, at this point, students turn to teachers, parents, guidance counselors, and classmates as resources in their decision processes. Sometimes this works. We, the authors of the project, for example wound up at art school, training in design and finding what feels like a real calling early in our lives. This is great. However, we feel that we are the lucky exceptions in today’s society. So many students slip through the cracks with no career drive to keep them on a steady path toward a self sufficient lifestyle. Teachers and parents are well-intentioned, but often have little or no knowledge of the industry conditions of their children or students. Guidance counselors are outnumbered, seeing on average 450 students each, leaving them with little time to get in-depth knowledge of current career conditions and trends in business and academia. We asked ourselves, what can we do to help this?

Service Design Guide 11

Competitive Analysis There are many existing services that cater to our demographic with nearly identical missions in mind. “Career matching” and “job finding” websites are a dime a dozen, and for good reason: no one has done this the right way. Matchmakers

Long Lists

Two of the main strategies we saw at work in the competitive landscape were matchmaking and long list returning. First of all, most of these websites start out with extensive registration processes, which require a great deal of personal information and inundate users’ email inboxes with loads of career spam. Obviously this has to go, as it cheapens the entire experience, leaving the user to question the fundamental motives of service. Online career matchmaking services usually have excellent intent. In fact, we tried to learn from them. There is something valuable in the idea that your interests are intrinsically linked to career decisions, and we have nothing wrong with the idea of matchmaking services. We just have a big problem with their execution. Interfaces are clunky, results can seem random, the interests to choose from are often too general (‘creativity’) or too specific (‘poker’), and more importantly, there are rarely ever ‘next steps’ for figuring out what that career entails or how one would go about getting on that path.

The other prominent strategy we came across was to provide students with a long list of potential ideas for career paths. This list often had no hierarchy. Theoretically, it is easy to navigate in that you can search by name or filter by parameters such as ‘industry,’ ‘field of study,’ ‘salary,’ etc., but this is not conducive to discovering a career path that you were not aware of, and it provides nothing in the way of inspiration. The experience would not be much different than just getting the same data from a series of Google searches, leaving the question ‘why would students ever use this?’

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Career finding websites: CareerShip.com, a ‘matchmaker’-style service (above); and MyFuture.com, a ‘long list’-style service (below)

Service Design Guide 13

“Meeting notes” from the first group meeting. It lasted seven hours, and was quite successful. Photograph by Jeremiah Louf. 2011.

PA R T 2

Our Approach Creating a platform to inform and inspire students about career paths

Initial Strategies 1 “Solving the Education Crisis” In our first take on a solution, we thought way too big. Asking ourselves “how can we solve the education crisis?” was probably too ambitious, but at least it got us in the right mindset to take on such systemic problems and understand the role of our service in today’s education environment.

2 What Did You Do Today? Next, we decided to try to pinpoint our idea to the simplest implementation possible. The service was based on the idea that directly asking students to list interests is not conducive to finding out what they’re actually interested in. Instead, we wanted to try to determine students’ interests based on their daily activities. While it was a nice thought, we decided this would not pan out in the long run.

SocialMediaCrawler.com Our last ‘dead-end’ idea was similar to What Did You Do Today? It sprung from the same frustration with traditional input methods (if a student can tell you what they want to be doing, they wouldn’t need a career finder). This time our matchmaker mechanism was social media services. It would crawl your Facebook posts, Tweets, etc. and make educated guesses on what you might like to do with your life. Drawings by Jeremiah Louf

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Intense Iteration “We want to showcase results as content, as the star of the show, rather than clump them in a convenient, discreet textblock.” It’s All About Results As a group, we liked both the What Did You Do Today? and SocialMediaCrawler.com and concepts. However, we knew that neither would work, which is a big problem. To fix this, we decided to find what it was in these concepts that we liked. Where, exactly, was the equity in these ideas? What Did You Do Today? ultimately failed because of its input method. At first we thought we were being smart by abstracting career interests in analyzing daily activities. However, we soon realized this would be a huge problem. What if you had a horrible day? The whole service was relying on the tenuous assumption that our target population was already doing what they wanted to do, which rarely the case. So what was good about this idea? It was certainly different for one. The input method was good in that it asked you a strategically pointed question that is easy to answer truthfully. Also, we had some really exciting ideas about how the results content would be returned to the user. We wanted to incorporate all kinds of media into the results pages, and really beef them up. Instead of a headline and a copy-pasted paragraph description, why not treat students to a narrative documentary-style video about a career field? Can we incorporate graphics, statistics, and expertise in these results pages? These were the ideas that really got us on the right path. Google’s What Do You Love? minisite was a great inspiration for our What Did You Do Today? concept. What Do You Love? was a minisite Google launched in summer

2011 to promote the variety of their media services. On the site, a user would enter a simple search query and Google would return all different kinds of media (maps, videos, 3-D models, discussion threads, events, etc.) relating to your topic. The minisite itself was not particularly functional or highly developed, but what we liked about this concept was the idea of results feeling curated as if they were in a gallery. Each element takes up a hefty block of space and demands the user’s attention and consideration, as opposed to a simple, unobtrusive line item found in traditional ‘list’ results. We want to showcase results as content, as the star of the show, rather than clump them together in a convenient, discreet textblock.

Google’s “What Do You Love?” minisite returns results across all media. wydl.com.

Service Design Guide 17

Proposed Service 4 mathplus Our final concept was for a service to inspire, inform, and connect math students to the professional world. It stars with simple-but-smart matchmaking mechanisms. Results are displayed in “career snapshots,” which prominently feature narrative videos depicting various professions.

math plus

and business

and technology

science

actuary animal migration analyst algorithm developer artificial intelligence programmer computational chemist consultant financial analyst software engineer

Math? Why Math? Adding math to the formula really was a key step in our process, probably the second most important one after choosing students as our target. All along we were having issues because we felt that the problem was too big. How would we help any student find their career path? We felt as if we were trying to solve the whole education ‘crisis,’ and it seemed highly unmanageable. It was like all of our pieces were moving and we just needed to pin one thing down. Selecting math-inclined, but career path-less students

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gave us a specific need to use as an index to refer back to. Questions went from “would this work to any student ever?” to “would this work for the math students we have in mind?” This fundamental paradigm shift was the breakthrough the group needed to plan out a seriously helpful service for our target. This degree of specificity helped us make more strategic decisions. We took a moment to do some further research on math education, careers, and industry, to get some perspective of our new situation.

CREATIVE TEAM

COMPANY

CAREER SNAPSHOTS TAILORED TO THE USER

CAREER SNAPSHOTS Applied Mathematics

Biomathematics

Computer Science

Working on problems in physics, chemistry, geology, and engineering from a mathematical perspective.

The application of mathematics in the health sciences.

This is a field on its own, but one of the mathiest parts of it is graphics and animation.

Matching result

USER

Financial Mathematics

Statistics

Research

Mathematics used on Wall Street, for mortgage backing, financial derivatives, and stock market analysis.

The study of methods for collecting, classifying, analyzing and making inferences from data.

The application of mathematics to problems of optimization, especially large-scale or complex problems and especially in the field of business.

Size is based on the importance based on the questions answered.

White (half Italian) 20 years old 5’ 5” tall Sophomore at BU Doesn’t declare major until Junior year Barely got into BU — he’s not stupid, but he’s definitely scraping by Has to take basic courses because he’s not on the “advanced track” Right now, he’s only going through the motions of school Goes to school on loan — so he has to be mindful of money, and also need a career lined up for graduation Has a part-time work study calling alumni to get donations for his school (telemarketing) Is good at math, but not fond of it Loves to play poker with his friends Collects bottle caps Has some confidence — he got through hard times

A working diagram for the mathplus service structure

Service Structure Often on career-finding websites, companies post their own listings to entice potential employees, and other times these descriptions are written by editors at the careerfinding service. Often, these descriptions are students’ only interaction with the given company or industry. These important narrative need to be crafted by people who know storytelling, and who are used to designing communication documents for a wide audience. We decided to take a new approach to this problem.

mathplus has a creative team that both researches job fields and works directly with companies to portray their industry online in beautifully produced video narratives in a documentary-like format. This ensures that students are met with media that is engaging and well-designed. This improves both the experience of using the service and easy comprehension of materials.

Service Design Guide 19

Functionality mathplus

business

technology science

arts

politics

health

mathplus

sports

FEATURED CAREER SNAPSHOTS

AVIATION ENGINEERING civil engineering