Week 8: 4 Steps Flow

This week, we worked on the 4 Steps Flow task, where we were asked to describe our solution as 4 key steps representing the user’s interactions with the app.

We initially defined the four steps, but through a discussions with our course mentors, we realized that something was missing. The solution felt too technical and lacked emotion. It didn’t fully express the values we want the application to stand for.

Our Core Values

After further discussion, we identified the core values we want to embed in the experience: empathy (toward how each student feels), teacher initiative, responsibility, personalization, and creating meaningful connections.

Based on these values, we refined our solution.

Our New Solution

The solution is a teacher-facing application that provides a clear picture of the class’s social well-being and helps teachers create social connections between isolated students and their peers.

On the main screen, the teacher sees all students represented as circles, each containing the student’s photo. Every circle visually reflects the student’s social well-being (for example, through color), based on a short weekly self-report answering the question: “How do I feel socially in class?”

The teacher can enlarge circles of students she wants to pay closer attention to and by tapping on a student’s circle, the teacher can view a floating information card with the student’s hobbies, interests, and strengths.

Next comes the visual matching stage. The teacher connects student circles based on the data, creating potential matches and identifying opportunities for social connections (for example, pairing two students who both enjoy basketball). These matches can then be translated into real-life actions at school, such as seating arrangements, group work, or social initiatives that naturally connect students based on the matching process.

The goal

Help teachers create natural social connections while the class is still forming, strengthen overall class cohesion, and support socially isolated students.

We will continue developing this solution toward next week’s speed-mentoring session, for which we have prepared a clear pitch presenting both the problem and our proposed solution.