Week 9: Speed Mentoring

Following our Speed-Mentoring session, this week was insightful. This session was a pivotal moment for our project, providing us with a flood of diverse perspectives, questions, and suggestions from experienced mentors.

The challenge wasn’t just listening to the feedback, but processing it. We received a wide range of comments—some contradictory, some inspiring, and some challenging our core assumptions. To make sense of it all, we sat down as a team and structured the feedback into three distinct categories:

1. To implement - Insights that resonated with our core values and improved the user experience

   • Nuance over Binary: We moved away from a simple "Good/Bad" status. We are now using a non-dichotomous color scale (Green-Yellow-Red) to reflect social well-being more accurately.

   • Trend Indicators: It’s not just about the "now." We added trend arrows for individual students (improving or declining social state) and a general trend view for the whole class.

   • Teacher Agency: The system shouldn't just decide; it should suggest. The teacher needs the ability to reject an automated insight ("Dislike") to improve the system's future suggestions.

2. Not to implement: Suggestions that, while valid, diverted us from our specific problem statement or the teacher-centric approach we are committed to. We made a conscious decision to set these aside to stay focused.

   • Variable Shapes: We considered using different shapes to tell a story, but realized it would create too much cognitive load. We are sticking to circles to keep the interface clean and focused on the data (faces and colors).

3. Would have liked to implement: Great ideas that we would have loved to include (technical features or broad expansions) but realized we are strictly limited by time or technical constraints.

   • Indirect Data Collection: In the future, we want to refine how we ask students about their status. We aim to replace direct questions with indirect methods to bypass resistance and gather more authentic data.

   • Triggering Empathy: We would like to incorporate behavioral prompts—such as "Who did you say good morning to today?"—to actively encourage social awareness and action.

Refining the Scenario (Again)

This filtering process forced us to be critical about our solution. It wasn't just about adding features; it was about stripping away the noise to find the essence of our product.

Consequently, we went back to our scenario. We refined the narrative to ensure it clearly reflects the teacher's journey without getting lost in unnecessary complexity.

Our Updated Flow

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.

The Dashboard View - the teacher opens the app and sees the specific class view. Every student is represented by a circle containing their photo and name.

• Visual Status: The border color (Green/Yellow/Red) reflects their weekly reported social feeling.

• Trends: A small arrow next to the circle indicates if their social situation is on an upward or downward trend compared to last week.

The "Insights" Button - we realized the teacher is busy, so we added a toggle button for "Insights Mode." When clicked, the display changes dynamically:

1. Size by Need: The circles of students reporting low social well-being (Red/Yellow) automatically become larger, instantly drawing the teacher's attention to where it is needed most.

2. Smart Connections: The system draws lines connecting potential matches between students based on shared data points.

3. Floating Info Cards: Clicking a student (or auto-triggered in Insights mode) reveals deep data: Hobbies, media interests (music/TV), strengths, family position, location, and even how they get to school.

From Insight to Action The teacher can accept the system's suggestions or create her own manual connections by dragging a line between two students. Once a match is made, the app suggests practical applications via the "Views" Feature:

• Seating Arrangements: Suggesting where to place these students to foster the connection.

• Group Work: creating groups of 5 for upcoming activities based on these matches.

The Goal To help the teacher identify connections—friendships that will last—based on deep commonalities like personality traits and values, rather than just superficial interactions.

With the scenario tightened and the feedback processed, we now feel much more aligned and ready for the next stages of development.