Hotspot is a mobile internet cafe to support Black and Latinx teens through loneliness
UX Research, A Racial Equity Project
Skills: Moderated Interviews, Co-creation & Co-design sessions, Secondary Research
Our goal
Support Black and Latinx teens navigating loneliness during the pandemic through mobile space making and facilitating access to technology.
Accomplishments
Created an intervention for a racial equity project to alleviate loneliness for Black & Latinx teens during the COVID pandemic
Facilitated codesign and co-creation workshops to involve teens in the design process
Led research & conducted interviews with teens to learn about how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected their mental health
Duration
January 2021 - July 2021
Team
Melissa Regalado (UX Researcher)
Crystal Torres (Designer)
Sebastian Martinez (Designer)
Zaynab AbdulQadir-Morris (Video Editor & Copy Writer)
Lord Crawford (Project Management)
Shelby Zink (Mentor)
Presentation Link
Background and Context
Racial Disparities, Health Care & Racial Equity
COVID-19 has left the world grappling with uncertainties. Although countries are now coming out of lockdown, the challenges related to the longer term impact on students’ mental health continue to exacerbate in risk.
Secondary Research Finding
Consequences of Quarantine
“The social isolation during quarantine has actually been looked at as being most problematic for long-term outcomes across adults and children and adolescents. It’s hit children most significantly because kids play in groups. During this time, kids really haven’t been able to hang out in groups or go to playgrounds.”
Research Question
How might we design a solution to support Black and Latinx teens navigate feelings of loneliness under the constraints of the pandemic?
Our Research Journey
Methods Used Throughout Project
Our entire research took 13 weeks. We began to narrow our scope through preliminary research by reading academic articles on how loneliness had been exacerbated the pandemic and continued to do a codesign session, further secondary research, and a co-creation session.
Methodology x Participants
Interviews
Methods Used Throughout Project
We conducted exploratory interviews with high school teens across the U.S. to discover how they were feeling about and coping with life throughout the pandemic.
Interview Insights
Codesign
After our interviews, we conducted a codesign to dig deeper into how teens were coping with loneliness and isolation during the pandemic. One of these activities allowed our teens to reflect on a day in their life and take us through their day- the activities they did, the feelings they experienced, and who they spent time with. We wrapped up our codesign with anideation session with teens where they shared a moment they felt happy and came up with ways/possible solutions that would alleviate their feelings of loneliness and would allow them to feel more joy and happiness during times of hardship.
A Day in the Life journey map
Experience Bank activity
Collage Brain dump activity
Codesign Findings
We came into this codesign with the intent to collect insight on how teens cope with and manage loneliness. In the end we were able to conclude that teens yearned for social interaction with friends but also balance it with virtual events/interaction.
Secondary Research x Codesign Insights
Once we gathered insights from the codesign session, we conducted secondary research to ideate on solutions that would alleviate issues with loneliness and isolation for teens. One of the main insights we received was that the pandemic made it harder to maintain and form friendships so we wanted to help teens find a community with people who shared their interests, hobbies, and experiences.
From Research to Solution
We ended up combining our insights from interviews, codesign and secondary research to present possible solutions to teens in a workshop. At the end of this we came up with two solutions. A virtual hangout space and a social app for teens only. Something that resonated with teens was a desire for a safe space for social interaction.
New Research Question
Our feedback for these two solutions from our teens led us to redefine our research question to best reflect our findings and problem
How might we design a safe and accessible space for high school enrolled Black and Latinx teens to physically be in community while utilizing technology and tactile games without financial barriers?
Social Media Survey
This new question led us to send out a survey to gauge what teens thought of a hybrid approach for an online/in-person community
Co-Creation & Concept Validation
To build equity into our project we engaged in a co-creation and concept validation process. Teens played a crucial role in our co-creation process. We asked teens who volunteered to create their ideal community. The goal was to see what teens valued the most when creating a community and what makes for a safe space. Furthermore, through this co-creation process we were able to confirm that teens desired a hybrid community consisting of in person and virtual interaction/socialization. This led us to our solution!
Our Solution… a mobile truck internet cafe :)
All of our research with teens led us to create a mobile internet cafe. We wanted to make this as accessible as possible, so a mobile seemed like the right approach because it would allow us to move to multiple locations. It’s a hybrid! It’s both an online and physical space.
Our findings concluded that teens like building relations in person and online. This is a great way to combine those two fields and this bridges the gap between in person and online interactions.
Internet Cafe Essentials
Some things we are thinking of providing are wifi (so they would bring their own laptops or we could provide them as well), snacks, software programs like adobe and microsoft suite
Factors We Considered
Some things we considered when creating our solution when we were conducting research was that teens didn’t have reliable access to internet, wifi or technology. But teens liked social media because it would allow them to find a community.
Logistics of Mobile Cafe
Branding & Concept
Lastly, two of our designers, Crystal Torres and Sebastian Martinez worked on our branding, logo, and poster concepts for our mobile internet cafe. We decided to go with the name Hotspot and wanted to focus on these keyword: Friendly, Safe, Fun, Creative, & Trendy. So, we chose pastels color and gradients that resonate that.
Look at the impact!
We wanted to share our project and presentation with our teens at the end so we reached out to them and asked them for feedback on our presentation and project idea! It turned out that none of them had something like this and that they would love to see this idea/project come to life! We also asked our teens if this is a project they would want to continue to work on and help come to life and all of them said YES! This was so exciting for us to hear because…
our project ended up making an impact on teens
this project wasn’t just a project for school or work, it has the potential to be something so much more and do a lot of good for Black and Latinx teens in the community!
What our teens are saying
“I liked the project in the past when we talked about kids clubs and apps and what could possibly be in an app.”
— Alex B.
“This is an amazing concept, and I think it’d help teens all over! I think this project is brilliant. I think it gives teens a place to go and takes away the fear or going somewhere to get away.”
— Alex R.
“I would want to see this idea and project come to life because I feel like it will be a really great opportunity.”
— Anonymous Participant
“Often times it can be scary to go somewhere alone or when you feel alone, but having a place that is meant to curb those feelings is a wonderful idea for teens to enjoy.”
— Anonymous Participant
What’s Next?
This project is currently on hold, but based on the feedback we collected from our teens, this is a project we definitely want to continue working on in the future! Because our team is based works full-time in either school or work, we are currently evaluating who wants to continue their involvement with this project. Once we decide who has the bandwidth for this project, we will start making a timeline/plan for this project. Stay tuned!
Lessons Learned 🌟
This was the first racial equity focused project I worked on. I learned that involving the people you are created for is the key to a successful project. Rather than building for someone, build WITH them. That’s why we made our teens part of every step of our project- from interviews, to codesign sessions, to co-creation workshops. They’ve seen it all.
Your research question should evolve over time as you do more research. Our research question started broad but eventually we narrowed it down because rather than designing for everyone, we wanted to create something specifically for Latinx & Black teens.
Presentations for research can be text heavy! However, I wanted to tell the story of this project so that anyone could understand it and that meant trimming down the research to the point where we summarized the insights from our research, a brief overview of the research process, so we could tell a compelling story through research.