BridgeUs
1. Introduction
During my two years with the Tech4Good research lab at UC Santa Cruz, I focused on understanding and addressing the complexities of youth career exploration. As I strengthened my design skills, I took on the challenge of leading a product I hadn’t previously worked on. BridgeUs already had its core contributions outlined and some preliminary designs, and my role was to guide the team in further defining and fleshing out these designs in preparation for prototype testing. I was responsible for setting goals for the team, facilitating discussions, and ensuring we were on track to meet deadlines.
Imagine This Scenario...
As a high school student deciding on your career path, you feel torn between your own interests and your parents' expectations. They believe you should become a doctor, but your passion lies in sociology. This difference creates tension in your conversations about the future, making it difficult for you to express your aspirations and needs without fear of disappointment or misunderstanding.
As a parent of a low-income family, you’ve struggled to make ends meet and want the best for your child. Your hope is that they will become a doctor, providing them with financial stability and security in the future. However, they have their heart set on pursuing sociology, refusing to take your advice. This creates frustration and worry, as you struggle to provide guidance without alienating your child.
Now Put Yourself in the Parent's Shoes
Introducing BridgeUs: Using Anonymous Insights to Improve Parent-Child Communication
We developed BridgeUs as a resource to ease family tensions surrounding career conversations and transform them into empowering discussions. Using structured prompts, BridgeUs guides families in exploring the anonymous perspectives of other students and parents within a child’s classroom community. They can then use these responses as conversation starters with their own parent or child while maintaining plausible deniability.
2. Why Make It Anonymous?
If the goal is to encourage conversations between children and their parents, then why go through the trouble of making things anonymous?
- It encourages honest and open reflection: HCI literature shows that anonymous online communities have the potential to encourage honest and open reflection.
- It allows for plausible deniability: Students can use anonymous responses to seed discussions with their parents. If they feel unsafe in the conversation, they have the ability to deny that the response reflects their views.
Why is BridgeUs based in a classroom community? Why not just make it a public forum?
When thinking through the idea, we recognized that the anonymous nature may pave the way for trolling. However, hosting BridgeUs within a classroom setting helps mitigate this risk since users are part of a shared real-world community.
3. Defining an Effective Set of Prompts
Our first goal was to define a small set of prompts for in preparation prototype testing. We had some existing prompts from the previous designers who worked on BridgeUs, but they included too many themes and lacked a cohesive structure. I decided to recategorize and reorganize them based on the obstacles they address, prioritizing the questions that build empathy and foster healthy parental engagement. By focusing on the impact of each question, our team was able to create a small but meaningful set of prompts.
Our Prompts Aim to Help Parents Understand...
A Student's Internal Struggles
Parents don't always understand the internal struggles their children face. By exploring the ways in which these struggles can affect a student's career development, parents can approach career conversations through a more empathetic lens.
How They Can Support Their Child
Parents are often unsure of how to adequately support their child without overstepping boundaries. By exploring other people's perspectives on this, they can use these insights to inform conversations with their children.
4. Displaying Community Responses
Next, we needed to determine the best way to display the anonymous responses in a way that encourages participants to engage with and learn from others' perspectives. Although there was an existing design, we wanted to explore alternative visualizations to find the most effective options to test. To gather a diverse range of ideas, I had each team member iterate on the page, ensuring a variety of approaches and visualizations were considered.
Previous Design
- Strengths: Feelings of community brought on by cocoon-style grouping.
- Limitations: Can only view one response at a time. The style of cocoon circles doesn't match the other assets.
- Questions to Consider: Will displaying usernames allow people to identify account owners? Will users feel that the emotion icons are insightful?
My Iteration
- Strengths: Themes are easily scannable. Can compare perspectives across themes.
- Limitations: Responses may sometimes fit into multiple themes which could result in duplicates. Can only view one response at a time for each theme.
- Questions to Consider: Does displaying the profile pictures hinder anonymity? Will prioritizing the most common responses discourage participants from learning about alternative perspectives?
5. From Anonymous Responses to Direct Discussions
Since these responses are all anonymous, participants aren't directly communicating with their own parent or child. Therefore, our next goal was to guide them in using these anonymous responses as a way to initiate direct conversations with their parents or children.
Outlining Discussion Guidelines
To prepare parents and children for healthy discussions, I researched literature on parent-child communication and compiled a set of discussion guidelines. When integrating this guide into BridgeUs, we simplified it into brief descriptions to ensure the guidelines were concise and easy to follow.
Don't Know How to Start the Conversation?
However, we understood that guidelines alone might not be sufficient, as many people struggle to initiate career conversations with their parent or child. To address this, we included examples of conversation starters designed to promote understanding and avoid judgment.
6. Roadblocks and Next Steps
This was all in preparation for a research study and prototype testing, so what did you learn from the research and testing?
So far, we've been unable to gather participants from our target audience. We were initially planning to test BridgeUs with students enrolled in a local high school career seminar, alongside our other platform, ExploreCareers. However, the group was small, and most students we spoke with did not express challenges in navigating career discussions with their parents, leading us to focus the study on ExploreCareers.
What are the next steps for BridgeUs?
Once we find participants for our study, we will outline the methods for testing the effectiveness of BridgeUs. This will involve examining:
- how effectively our prompts and discussion guide help facilitate healthy career conversations, and...
- the most optimal layout for the community response page to promote engagement with diverse perspectives.
7. Reflections
In my journey with BridgeUs, I gained valuable insights that significantly shaped my approach to teamwork and problem-solving.
Communicating Uncertainty
Having not previously worked on BridgeUs, I quickly recognized the importance of being open about uncertainties and seeking clarification. This approach not only deepened my understanding of how to set goals for BridgeUs but also cultivated a more collaborative and supportive environment within the team.
Adapting to Unexpected Situations
This experience underscored the importance of adaptability. When initial strategies, such as recruiting suitable participants for testing, did not yield the expected results, I learned to adjust our approach and remain flexible in our planning.