Challenge

Adolescence is a particularly difficult time and teenagers go through many rites of passage. For  most people, their final high school exams are the first high stakes, life-impacting exams.

As humans we forget around 50% of what we learned yesterday and by the end of the week  70% has gone (Ebbinghaus, 2013). To combat this we study, but most study habits used by  students are high effort, low efficiency and not brain friendly (eggion, 2017).

There is relentless, and growing pressure on senior high school students to perform, but it  comes at a cost. Around 40% of Australian Year 12 students have clinical anxiety issues around  exams (North, 2015).

I believed that an app that provided a highly personalised study/revision experience would help  these students achieve their academic goals with less stress.

Selection

Confident in my technical knowledge of behavioural and cognitive science and the high-level  secondary research but resource constrained, like many start-ups my challenge was whether an  app could be designed that was visually engaging, simple to use and likely to materially benefit  students and to learn this without expending all of my resources. Given my context I chose the  Learning Launch tool to help bring the visual product designs to life and learn whether the  identified customer needs and underlying key assumptions were true, or not as the case maybe.

A Learning Launch is a process whereby a hypothesis can be tested by:

§  Specifying the current key assumptions, across

§  Identifying and understanding the key pain felt by students and their parents

§  Test whether our key assumptions matched the students’ and their parents’ truth

§  Ascertain whether key design perspectives would be simple, engaging and effective

§  Gauge to under what circumstances customers would act to resolve their pain

Application

I applied the Learning Launch to gain deeper quality data and insight from students, parents and  senior high school teachers to decide whether I should pursue the idea or put it on hold. The key  steps taken were:

§  Define key assumptions

§  Define interviewee criteria, e.g. age, gender and background

§  Develop mobile app visual design mock-ups

§  Define interview pro forma and product demonstration path

§  One-on-one interviews of students, parents and senior high school teachers

§  Compare new data and insights against key customer, product and commercial  assumptions.

The interviews were one-on-one, to reduce the influence of others on their feedback, to enable  deeper discussion of feedback, richer understanding of context, feelings and thoughts. At the  beginning of the interviews my goals were made clear to the interviewees. All I wanted to learn

was their perspective and truth, and that they should not hold back their feedback as I needed  to know whether the idea was potentially great, middling or a dud so that I could make an  informed decisions. To ensure some counterpoint, senior high school teachers who are trained  in the traditional methods of study/revision were interviewed to gain a likely more sceptical point  of view.

Insight

From the Learning Launch process I learned:

§  To actively consider a customer/person’s broader health context to identifying  underlying drivers and designing responses.

§  Personal stories of challenging times for students and they felt our product would have  helped improve their situation which I can share with prospective employees, investors  and others to bring the idea to life.

§  The circumstances under which the customer would, and would not likely try and buy  the product.

Approach

I was content with selecting the Learning Launch as a means to confirm or reject my key  perspective and assumptions. In a similar situation I would make the following changes:

§  Engage other people to undertake some interviews to gain broader assessment  feedback and further dilute my confirmation bias.

§  Adolescents have a high bar for visual design and our mock-ups needed a higher level  of visual polish.

§  Add a more diverse range of interviewees to increase the breadth and quality of  feedback.

