Explore Buddy

A prototype product pitch of a hobby searching platform for kids and growing teenagers

Design Project

Growing up as immigrant or international student, many members of our group have lived our teenage years for the sole goal of being admitted into a good university. We grow up living a life centered around the concept: “Feel free to do whatever you want in life, but focus on getting into a good university first. Once you get in a good university, you’ll get unlimited opportunities to search for what you like.”

Whether it is academics, practicing unique musical instruments, participating in sporting clubs and competitions, or many more, we were made to do as it is part of the equation for success; it is what colleges would like to see in a successful applicant. We were under the impression that we still had time in college; once we get into a good college, we would have time to try out new hobbies.

Role:

Team: Emily Y. Do, Yang-Kai Hsieh (Me), Elsie Akaduh, Jeongah Lee

Duration: 5 weeks (April 2022 - May 2022)

Tools: Figma, Canva

Role: Ideation, Research, Prototyping, Product Design (Work done as a group in-person or on Zoom, with everyone participating for each stage)

Problem / Story Overview

As a group filled with immigrant and international undergraduate students, many members of our group share the same commonality; we are not sure exactly what we are passionate in pursuing as a career. We felt left behind by the vast amount of passionate individuals who came into college knowing fully well what they love to do for a living, while we scramble to discover new options the world can provide to us while stressing about the hard deadline of the event called graduation.

Our parents care a whole lot for us. They lead us towards what they think will be good in the long run of our lives based on their life experience. However, would these experiences always be relevant in our rapidly changing world? Or rather, in the case parents were to try to help us find our hobbies early in our lives, would they have enough resources to access rapidly increasing available options our world can provide, especially in less resourceful parts of the world?

Based on these common stresses and regrets, we tried doing research and interviews with hopes of coming up with a potential solution. Using the results, we proposed a prototype solution of improvement to this issue utilizing the digital environments: Explore Buddy

For better understanding of the problem, we started by interviewing those who are close to us, like each of our parents, my 12 year old cousin and Emily’s 11 year old brother to gather insights on different perspectives. We summarized these perspectives into two identities: Daisy(mother) and Maisy(child).

After the information gathering, we tried listing the issues and categorizing them in different groups:

Emphasize / Research

Doing, Thinking, Feeling

Daisy(Mother) and Maisy(Child)

Based on the information gathered, we gradually identified two main issues revolving around our problem: parent to child communication and resource accessibility.

We started ideating solutions by creating “How might we…” statements to hypothesize potential solutions:

Ideation

Then, based on the how might we statements, we each came up with potential solutions and drew a graph of correlation between feasibility and impact to users.

Prototyping

Short Demo of our prototype:

We came up with a prototype: Explore Buddy, an online web platform where children could explore their hobbies while effectively communicating with their parents.

Conclusion

After a presentation of our ideas to professional designers and entrepreneurs, we received many questions, feedbacks ,and advices regarding the future feeability of this project.

Some feedbacks include:

  • The maintaining of Explore Buddies (how do and who maintains this site?)

  • The managing of in-person activity and resources

  • The persuasion of parents (how do we convince parents to allow children to use this site?)

  • Minimizing the scope of our issue (“hobby” may be a huge hurdle to tackle; maybe the same idea on a smaller scope?)

Personally, I would like to explore this idea more and potentially develop the our Explore Buddy concept to fruition.