Adobe Creative Jam: Good Apples
(4 to 5 minute read)
On November 19th, 2019, Adobe's Ontario College Creative Jam was held at several colleges across the Greater Toronto Area and Ottawa. Teams from the participating schools had 4 hours to concept, design and assemble a working prototype based on a pre-determined prompt (we were unable to know ahead of time) using Adobe XD.
Below is the process of creating our prototype, along with additional footage of the prototype in action.
Unlike other projects in this portfolio, I took on more of a supervisory role, acting as both a project lead of sorts, and as a "floater" who was able to jump in and help my team when and where needed during the prototype design and assembly process, particularly when it came to user flow.
Context & Challenges
During the info session at the beginning of the evening, we found out our prompt: creating an an app prototype for academic integrity.
Our team wanted to design something that was different than what may have been done in the past (ex. an app prototype in which you take a picture of your document and scan to see if there is any potential for plagiarism/academic misconduct).
Process & Insight
We started by having a brainstorming session to try and figure out what causes people to plagiarize or commit misconduct. It was determined that a lack of time management and/or simply not knowing how to start or approach an assignment were the key reasons that people feel compelled to take shortcuts, and subsequently commit academic misconduct.
Eventually, we found our concept. Our app, titled "Good Apples" (more on that in a bit) was designed to be a crowd-sharing form of tutoring where you could seek a certified tutor to receive help for projects, or become a certified tutor from anywhere.
People can be reluctant to ask their teacher/professor or peers for help for a multitude of reasons. Other times they may not receive a quick enough response on an urgent matter regarding a project. Our app would allow users to go on their phone and receive the help they need in minutes. We also wanted to use this app as a way to start a community though direct interactions.
An excerpt from our app's overall user flow, displayed via artboards.
The prototype below shows a user flow for someone who is seeking help (the app would also have a flow for someone who wants to give help as a tutor). The user would be able to narrow down what they need help with based on level of education, and topic of interest.
The app would locate potential tutors in the area and send them over to the user. The user would then begin a conversation with their tutor, where they can get the assistance needed for their project. They would also be able to send pictures or document files of their projects for first-hand review and feedback. We thought this would be more reliable than simply having someone send it through a scanner and hoping for the best.
To maintain the overall credibility/integrity and safety of the app, users would be allowed to rank the tutors out of up to 5 apples. Those with a mostly positive average would be labelled "Good Apples", while those who didn't would be deemed "Bad Apples".
Learning Outcomes
This was so different from anything I'd done in any of the other prototyping projects, mainly because we were under a short time limit. This project really reminded me of the importance of leadership, teamwork and communication.
It was a down to the wire project, but I'm happy with how our team rallied to complete the project. I am also especially grateful to my team for giving this a shot with me, especially since many of them had only started to use/learn it in a short period of time leading up to the event.
It was stressful at times, but seeing how hard everyone was working to bring this prototype to life made me work even harder to support our team. I would definitely give this another shot in the future, especially since we survived the "trial by fire" format of the Creative Jam. This was also a great opportunity to show what areas I needed more practice with, and I intend to keep working on developing techniques to help improve the speed of producing prototypes on XD.