Over the past weeks, we decided to move forward from our previous idea about enhancing general education in the class room, and focus on the subject of shyness in students and the effects it has on them, primarily in younger ages.
We finalized our decision in regards to the way we might want to help students overcome some the challenges the stems from shyness. We furthered our discussion on both the user’s and our product personification.
After conducting a few more interviews with teachers, psychologists, shy students and other trail-blazers in the field of education we realized that one of the most common “problem” with shy students which we suspect can hurt them later on is that most of them restrain from participating in class in regards to asking and answering questions. While it was understandable why a shy student, or anyone else at times would fear to take an active part in class, we needed to find out what could be the negative effects of restraining from speaking in class, and more importantly, what would be the positives of participating.
Talking to the psychologists, and doing further research helped us realize that class participation can actively engage students with subject matter, push them to create concepts, and force them to show evidence for their claims. It also can help children at younger ages develop better oral skills as well as help with crowd speaking abilities.
We want emphasize that our goal is not to “cure” shyness. We don’t view shyness itself as weakness and even we did, causes to shyness and ways to overcome it are far deeper and rooted in genetics and psychology. Our goal to help children overcome that “fear” of talking in class caused by shyness.
We concluded that our product should incite calmness, and security in students, as well as help them become more confident with participating in class.
In the Ideation stages of our planning, we brought up a lot of different ideas for products that focus on shy students, From crazy insane to more grounded in reality.
We also refined our thinking process by taking some the ideas brought from some of the best existing product in all fields such as Spotify and Amazon.
The interviews with teachers familiar with the problem, as well as students who define themselves as shy, helped us create a believable user persona of a 11 year old student named Gal, who's inability to participate in class due to shyness hampers his studying and overall school experience.
Over the coming days, we plan to further idealize our product, by refining the user's practical and emotional needs, as well as better define the product's persona in terms of name, role, values and overall perception. In addition, we plan to better understand it's own practical and emotional needs it can hopefully provide. We still work hard on the product's points of differentiation and overall vide.
