mathplus

SERVICE DESIGN GUIDE

mathplus

Contents

Intro/The Team 4

1 The Problem 9

The Assignment 10

Audience 11

Competitive Analysis 12

2 Our Approach 14

Initial Strategies 16

Intense Iteration 17

Proposed Service 18

Functionality 20

3 Creative Execution 22

Visual Identity 24

Narrative User Scenario Video 25

6 MATHPLUS

mathplus is a service for math-inclined students who

have little or no direction in their career path. The

service helps first inspire high school and college

students by introducing them to various applications

of mathematics in different disciplines. Then

mathplus can help connect to the professional world

with a system to set up meetups, video chats, and

send messages. We feel that these real connections

and thoughtfully curated media can efficiently give

students a true sense of a career path.

Service Design Guide 7

The Team

Will Bruno

Research Service designCreative directionArt direction

Jeremiah Louf

Research Service designCreative directionArt directionCopywriting

Nellie Kaiser

Research Service designCreative directionArt direction

Will Millar

Research Service designCreative directionArt directionCopywritingVideo productionService design guide

Photograph “Final Exam” by dcJohn. 2005. flic.kr/p/7BVsM.

PART 1

The Problem

U.S. high schools average 1 guidance counselor for

every 450 students.

Identify a target social group who is underserved in the digital marketplace. Based on demographic and ethnographic research, develop a proposal for a prototypical digital service designed to meet a specific need of your target.

The Assignment

Adapted from Brian Lucid’s Design Research: Service Design

Project at Massachusetts College of Art and Design

Service Design Guide 11

Audience

Choosing a target audience was one of the most critical steps in

the process, and it was the first decision we made in the project.

Personal Experience

In the group’s first meetings, brainstorming sessions, we found ourselves largely drawing on personal experience when citing examples of demographics, user needs, and other potential topics. Our roles as students, family members, and neighbors stuck out as topics of further investigation. We also made sure to consider social groups that we were not necessarily a part of, particularly “empty nest-er” parents, because we had a service ideas that might be interesting for them. However, at the end of the day, we ended up feeling that students were our best choice. We are very familiar with all the systems at play in students’ lives, and we have several ideas for areas of improvement for the student experience.

Target Demographic

We chose to target students from junior year of high school to sophomore year of college, so roughly ages 16 – 22. This is when the pressure is on students to start finding what they want to do in life. All of a sudden, after years of being instructed what to do and where to go, they are often thrown into a whole heap of self-initiated life decisions. Traditionally, at this point, students turn to teachers, parents, guidance counselors, and classmates as resources in their decision processes. Sometimes this works. We, the authors of the project, for example wound up at art school, training in design and finding what feels like a real calling early in our lives. This is great. However, we feel that we are the lucky exceptions in today’s society. So many students slip through the cracks with no career drive to keep them on a steady path toward a self sufficient lifestyle. Teachers and parents are well-intentioned, but often have little or no knowledge of the industry conditions of their children or students. Guidance counselors are outnumbered, seeing on average 450 students each, leaving them with little time to get in-depth knowledge of current career conditions and trends in business and academia. We asked ourselves, what can we do to help this?

12 MATHPLUS

Competitive Analysis

There are many existing services that cater to our demographic

with nearly identical missions in mind. “Career matching” and

“job finding” websites are a dime a dozen, and for good reason:

no one has done this the right way.

Matchmakers

Two of the main strategies we saw at work in the competitive landscape were matchmaking and long list returning. First of all, most of these websites start out with extensive registration processes, which require a great deal of personal information and inundate users’ email inboxes with loads of career spam. Obviously this has to go, as it cheapens the entire experience, leaving the user to question the fundamental motives of service. Online career matchmaking services usually have excellent intent. In fact, we tried to learn from them. There is something valuable in the idea that your interests are intrinsically linked to career decisions, and we have nothing wrong with the idea of matchmaking services. We just have a big problem with their execution. Interfaces are clunky, results can seem random, the interests to choose from are often too general (‘creativity’) or too specific (‘poker’), and more importantly, there are rarely ever ‘next steps’ for figuring out what that career entails or how one would go about getting on that path.

Long Lists

The other prominent strategy we came across was to provide students with a long list of potential ideas for career paths. This list often had no hierarchy. Theoretically, it is easy to navigate in that you can search by name or filter by parameters such as ‘industry,’

‘field of study,’ ‘salary,’ etc., but this is not conducive to discovering a career path that you were not aware of, and it provides nothing in the way of inspiration. The experience would not be much different than just getting the same data from a series of Google searches, leaving the question ‘why would students ever use this?’

Service Design Guide 13

Career finding websites: CareerShip.com, a ‘matchmaker’-style service (above); and MyFuture.com, a ‘long list’-style service (below)

“Meeting notes” from the first group meeting. It lasted seven hours, and was quite successful. Photograph by Jeremiah Louf. 2011.

PART 2

Our Approach

Creating a platform to inform and inspire students

about career paths

16 MATHPLUS

Initial Strategies

“Solving the Education Crisis”

In our first take on a solution, we thought way too big. Asking ourselves “how can we solve the education crisis?” was probably too ambitious, but at least it got us in the right mindset to take on such systemic problems and understand the role of our service in today’s education environment.

What Did You Do Today?

Next, we decided to try to pinpoint our idea to the simplest implementation possible. The service was based on the idea that directly asking students to list interests is not conducive to finding out what they’re actually interested in. Instead, we wanted to try to determine students’ interests based on their daily activities. While it was a nice thought, we decided this would not pan out in the long run.

SocialMediaCrawler.com

Our last ‘dead-end’ idea was similar to What Did You Do Today? It sprung from the same frustration with traditional input methods (if a student can tell you what they want to be doing, they wouldn’t need a career finder). This time our matchmaker mechanism was social media services. It would crawl your Facebook posts, Tweets, etc. and make educated guesses on what you might like to do with your life.

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2

1

Drawings by Jeremiah Louf

Service Design Guide 17

Intense Iteration

It’s All About Results

As a group, we liked both the What Did You Do Today? and SocialMediaCrawler.com and concepts. However, we knew that neither would work, which is a big problem. To fix this, we decided to find what it was in these concepts that we liked. Where, exactly, was the equity in these ideas? What Did You Do Today? ultimately failed because of its input method. At first we thought we were being smart by abstracting career interests in analyzing daily activities. However, we soon realized this would be a huge problem. What if you had a horrible day? The whole service was relying on the tenuous assumption that our target population was already doing what they wanted to do, which rarely the case. So what was good about this idea? It was certainly different for one. The input method was good in that it asked you a strategically pointed question that is easy to answer truthfully. Also, we had some really exciting ideas about how the results content would be returned to the user. We wanted to incorporate all kinds of media into the results pages, and really beef them up. Instead of a headline and a copy-pasted paragraph description, why not treat students to a narrative documentary-style video about a career field? Can we incorporate graphics, statistics, and expertise in these results pages? These were the ideas that really got us on the right path. Google’s What Do You Love? minisite was a great inspiration for our What Did You Do Today? concept. What Do You Love? was a minisite Google launched in summer

Google’s “What Do You Love?” minisite returns results across all media. wydl.com.

2011 to promote the variety of their media services. On the site, a user would enter a simple search query and Google would return all different kinds of media (maps, videos, 3-D models, discussion threads, events, etc.) relating to your topic. The minisite itself was not particularly functional or highly developed, but what we liked about this concept was the idea of results feeling curated as if they were in a gallery. Each element takes up a hefty block of space and demands the user’s attention and consideration, as opposed to a simple, unobtrusive line item found in traditional ‘list’ results. We want to showcase results as content, as the star of the show, rather than clump them together in a convenient, discreet textblock.

“We want to showcase results as content, as the star of the show,

rather than clump them in a convenient, discreet textblock.”

18 MATHPLUS

Proposed Service

mathplus

Our final concept was for a service to inspire, inform, and connect math students to the professional world. It stars with simple-but-smart matchmaking mechanisms. Results are displayed in “career snapshots,” which prominently feature narrative videos depicting various professions.

math plus =business

and and

technology science

actuaryanimal migration analystalgorithm developerartificial intelligence programmercomputational chemistconsultantfinancial analystsoftware engineer

4

Math? Why Math?

Adding math to the formula really was a key step in our process, probably the second most important one after choosing students as our target. All along we were having issues because we felt that the problem was too big. How would we help any student find their career path? We felt as if we were trying to solve the whole education ‘crisis,’ and it seemed highly unmanageable. It was like all of our pieces were moving and we just needed to pin one thing down. Selecting math-inclined, but career path-less students

gave us a specific need to use as an index to refer back to. Questions went from “would this work to any student ever?” to “would this work for the math students we have in mind?” This fundamental paradigm shift was the breakthrough the group needed to plan out a seriously helpful service for our target. This degree of specificity helped us make more strategic decisions. We took a moment to do some further research on math education, careers, and industry, to get some perspective of our new situation.

Service Design Guide 19

Service Structure

Often on career-finding websites, companies post their own listings to entice potential employees, and other times these descriptions are written by editors at the career-finding service. Often, these descriptions are students’ only interaction with the given company or industry. These important narrative need to be crafted by people who know storytelling, and who are used to designing communication documents for a wide audience. We decided to take a new approach to this problem.

A working diagram for the mathplus service structure

USER

Applied Mathematics

Working on problems in physics, chemistry, geology, and engineering from a mathematical perspective.

Biomathematics

The application of mathematics in the health sciences.

Computer Science

This is a �eld on its own, but one of the mathiest parts of it is graphics and animation.

Financial Mathematics

Mathematics used on Wall Street, for mortgage backing, �nancial deriva-tives, and stock market analysis.

Statistics

The study of methods for collecting, classifying, analyzing and making inferences from data.

Research

The application of mathematics to problems of optimization, especially large-scale or complex problems and especially in the �eld of business.

Matchingresult

CAREER SNAPSHOTS

CAREER SNAPSHOTS TAILORED TO THE USER

Size is based on the importance based on the questions answered.

CREATIVE TEAM

COMPANY

White (half Italian)20 years old5’ 5” tallSophomore at BUDoesn’t declare major until Junior yearBarely got into BU — he’s not stupid, but he’s definitely scraping byHas to take basic courses because he’s not on the “advanced track”Right now, he’s only going through the motions of schoolGoes to school on loan — so he has to be mindful of money, and also need a career lined up for graduationHas a part-time work study calling alumni to get donations for his school (telemarketing)Is good at math, but not fond of itLoves to play poker with his friendsCollects bottle capsHas some confidence — he got through hard times

mathplus has a creative team that both researches job fields and works directly with companies to portray their industry online in beautifully produced video narratives in a documentary-like format. This ensures that students are met with media that is engaging and well-designed. This improves both the experience of using the service and easy comprehension of materials.

20 MATHPLUS

mathplus business

savedsnapshots

rate interest level

technology science

aviation engineering

arts politics health sports

INDUSTRY JOB GROWTH

TAGS

PROFESSIONAL CONTACTS

get in touch

EXAMPLE CAREER PATH

SALARY

get in touch

get in touch

Functionality

Input: Category

The experience of mathplus begins with the user selecting their general areas of interest. This provides an initial filter for the system to give a preliminary round of results pages. The career paths provided combine math with the user’s general interests.

Output: Narrative Videos

The primary element on each “career snapshot” is a 5–10 minute video narrative produced by mathplus’s creative team. The team works directly with appropriate companies to form accurate depictions of any given industry.

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“career snapshot”

mathplus business

savedsnapshots

technology science arts politics health sports

TAGS

mathplus business

savedsnapshots

rate interest level

technology science

aviation engineering

arts politics health sports

INDUSTRY JOB GROWTH

TAGS

PROFESSIONAL CONTACTS

get in touch

EXAMPLE CAREER PATH

SALARY

get in touch

get in touch

engineering aerospace

risk and reliability mechanics

astrodynamics software2

get in touch

get in touch

PROFESSIONAL CONTACTS

engineering aerospaceresearch software

engineering aerospacesoftware materials

RalphMacchioKelly AviationCenter

NASA

Miyagi Associates

ElisabethShue

Elisabeth is an aerospace engineer who works with a team of various other engineers designing panels for NASA spaceships.

Ralph is an aviation engineer who leads a team of researchers and analysts to develop newer, faster jet engines.

aerospace mechanics risk and reliability

DanaAnderson

One of the most important people in the history of aeronautics, Cayley was a pioneer in aeronautical engineering.

get in touch

AVIATION ENGINEERING

photogrammetry

ACTURIAL MATHEMATICS

civil engineering

OPERATIONS RESEARCH

urban planning

geomatics engineering

robotics engineering

aerospace engineering

geographer

engineering computers

finance physical sciences

mechanics

FEATURED CAREER SNAPSHOTS

Preliminary results page

Service Design Guide 21

Output: Infographics

Results include industry data in the form of simple infographics touching on salary, job growth, and common career paths. When students view more “career snapshots” and add ratings, the system uses this data to suggest further results that will better match the user’s interests.

Professional Connections

Finally, when a user finds a topic they are interested in, mathplus can connect them to a professional in the field who is willing to share information and maybe even offer opportunities in the future. Students can sign up to meet the professionals at their office, videochat on mathplus, or just send a brief message.

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mathplus interface video by Will Millar. 2011. vimeo.com/33514687.

PART 3

Creative Execution

Making a deliverable to communicate all of our ideas about the service.

24 MATHPLUS

Visual Identity

Style and form

The end product of the mathplus service design project is by no means a finished product. Rather, it is a highly polished sketch of the idea of mathplus. In the visual design of the identity and video, we wanted to make sure audiences were always aware of it’s conceptual nature, but keep things at a fidelity high enough that the interface looked believable and not like a wireframe. In the end, we did this by keeping all visual elements as simple as possible, preserving rectilinear forms, and applying very consistent typography. We injected video footage into the formula, replacing static photograph to

mathplus

bring some life back into the narrative video, and add an element of personality into an aesthetic that is largely plain and unadorned.

Typography

Typography plays an important part in the deliverables because it serves to unify disparate elements. For example, in the narrative video, Facebook and Google web interfaces are recreated in Franklin Gothic with a limited color palette to keep the viewer’s attention on the service and the story, rather than the interface and the interaction.

Service Design Guide 25

Telling a story through interface

The hardest part about creating the narrative user scenario was figuring out the best format to tell the story of mathplus. As a group, we went through several preliminary ideas, and initially wanted to go the photographic route: we would shoot footage of users talking about the service and overlay interface elements on the screen at appropriate times. The problem with this approach, however, was that the

Narrative User Scenario Video

mathplus

Runtime — 3:15

interface seemed like an afterthought, when in reality the interface was one of the most important components we had developed thus far. Our solution was to go all interface. We used the opposite approach, this time incorporating characters and story elements into the interface, rather than the other way around. This let us tell a story and prominently feature our interface without it feeling forced.

Book set in Franklin Gothic and Mercury. Printed on Red River 32 lb. (cover is 50 lb.)

Premium Matte Double Sided paper. Thanks to Will Bruno, Nellie Kaiser, and Jeremiah

Louf for being fantastic teammates, to Professor Brian Lucid for his guidance with this

project, and to Massachusetts College of Art and Design. 2012.