Your team's goal is to choose and then design for a group of people that face difficulty with some aspect of "adulting". Importantly, your team should try to pick a user group that you all do not consider yourself a member of; this is so that you will not rely too much on your own experiences during user research. We know many of you may have first-hand knowledge about struggles with adulting (don’t we all!) but try to find an aspect of it that you haven’t directly encountered or that you don’t care that much about but that others have and do. Over the course of the quarter, your team will work on designing a system to help this group of people gain the kind of access that other groups may already have.
You should identify and consider goals and activities that are important to people. The domain could involve new responsibilities that people must learn about and juggle related to healthcare, finances, investing, nutrition, fitness, self-care, mental health, clothing and appearance, jobs, mentorship, volunteering, donating, recycling, voting, taxes, time management, information management, sustainability, sleep, education, childcare, family care, dating, moving, home/car/other maintenance, cleaning, insurance, and the list goes on! Activities within these domains could include directly helping people manage a particular adulting goal they may have, providing easy access to information or resources to people who don't have it, connecting people with adulting goals to other people who can offer support or other resources, forming a community among people with shared goals to help each other or collaborate, or highlight the difficulties that people face to call attention to the problem for policymakers, educators, etc.
Here are examples of prior projects from similar courses with target groups and ideas that would be relevant under this theme:
As part of your project, you will need to define what a specific group’s needs are that your project can help support, and what activity you would like to design to help address this need. While your design may not be able to address this head on, it may be useful to consider the conditions that allowed this disparity in question to arise while conducting user research and learning from your target group. Think about how the activity you chose is currently supported via technology (or not), what doesn’t work about current ways of supporting it, and how your solution will do this better. Finally, be specific in the group you select! The specificity of addressing a particular group of people allows you to deeply think about what makes the group unique and how you would best want to support them. So, dive in and see what you can come up with!
