Thank you all for all the additional comments, ideas and feedback. Most importantly, thank you for sharing this website with young people, parents and teachers, helping with all the user-testing and helping us gather these insights.
Overall, once we move to a more final version, we need to include more instructions for users, especially, the younger audience.
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UPDATES: December 9, 2013
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New input = User insights + OpenIDEO Mumbai Meetup + Mapping out ideas/ comments/ feedback from the OpenIDEO community (online + offline).
Updates include the following:
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New Features/ Pages: We've re-organised the website structure and added new pages such as "
Join us" (
aka Get Involved), "
My Profile", "
Team".
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My Profile: This new element has a significant impact on the evolution of this concept. The original idea was around "curated" content. New ideas during the meetup (read Dec. 7 update below) have added the dimension of "user-generated" content + the possibilities to personalise the user-experience on the website.
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Going offline: Based on the questions suggested for the refinement phase, we've mapped out ways of making the website content available to those without access to the internet.
A great inspiration for this is the
TEDx in a Box project
by
IDEO.org
. The material available on the platform can also be made available as a comprehensive toolkit to enable our creative confidence ambassadors/ champions to reach out to a much broader community! We will invite community champions/ ambassadors to get involved and "go offline". Check
this page
for more details
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New content: Essentially, we've really fleshed out the prototype. Earlier, the website structure gave the basic idea. But to enable richer user testing and feedback, we added a fair amount of real content on all the pages (do check - your idea is possibly featured there).
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New design and UX: The entire website has gone through a number of design changes, from page layouts to overall theme, and a lot of conversations around the user-journey on the platform, resulting in even more design changes.
Request for input:
We'd really appreciate if you could spend some time browsing the website to get a feel of the user experience, and share your feedback with us. What works well? What could be better?
Also, could you please share the link with teachers/ young people/ parents and let us know what they think of it?
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UPDATES: December 7, 2013
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I organised an OpenIDEO Mumbai Meetup yesterday to continue refining the concept with our local community. Thank you Jinal, Arpit, Bhavna and Shruti for participating and helping take the idea to the next level.
NEW Updates-in-progress (most have already been executed).
1.
User-testing: We decided to continue testing the website with our key audience groups - young people, parents and teachers. We will let them try the website, share more information about the thinking behind it, understand what they feel is the key value proposition for them, and gather insights shared.
2.
Fleshing out and refining the prototype website: We also decided to work on fleshing out the current prototype. We will provide more resources, stories and conversation starters on the website, and also continue curating and highlighting ideas from this OpenIDEO challenge. Also, the group suggested having more visual stories and rich media content, and ensuring that we don't just share stories of success but also highlight stories of failure. This would also allow us to provide a slightly more finished product to our user groups for more feedback.
3. Online + Offline
: We explored new ideas on making the resources, stories, conversations accessible to those who don't have access to the internet. For this, we are adding a "Get Involved" section on the website to invite and recruit youth/ parent/ teacher ambassadors and also partner with organisations who'd help us increase our reach!
4. Local Meetups and Events: Another offline element that was suggested was having a calendar of events on the website and encouraging community members to organise local Meetups (inspired by the OpenIDEO Meetups). This would allow for a good blend of online + offline conversations. And again, we can invite new members to these events who are probably not engaged online.
5. My Creative Confidence page: This was a really big idea that stirred a lot of conversation during the Meetup. We started talking about other online platforms that might inspire our thinking and names such as Amazon, Pinterest, Humans of New York, OpenIDEO were mentioned. And this led to the idea of more user-generated content. What if users could sign up, have their own profile page, indicate their areas of interest, how they want to get involved, get some sort of badges/ personal messages to encourage them, "pin" or "bookmark" relevant material on their own pages…
6. UX and Design elements: And finally, there were new ideas on updating the design of the website (lighter background?), mapping out the user-journey, changing the layout of a few pages etc.
As a group, we are now working on updating the website with all of these ideas (and then some more), while continuing to reach out to more users and gather feedback.
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You'll see the basic sections and get a general idea of the concept. Since it's all online, we can keep updating and refining this. And for that, we'd love for you to participate!
Participate (we need you): Here's a google document created which explains the structure of the website and invites you to add your ideas. Please join the conversation and let's design together!
CONCEPT SUMMARY (The Original)
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The idea: An online hub for creative confidence
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Why?
There are several amazing online platforms dedicated to different domains – from career advice to cooking, interior design to life hacking, gaming to gardening… how about a website which serves as a one-stop-shop for creative confidence!
What?
This dedicated online space would serve as a source of inspiration, a helpline for creative confidence, a platform to swap stories and a vibrant community to belong to. I am proposing different sections for parents, teachers and young people (with relevant resources, toolkits, exercises etc) based on the different ideas that have been shared during this challenge.
Advantages of a web portal? Low cost; high reach; easy accessibility; dynamic, iterative and interactive; scalability. We can use help from the community to have the website translated into several other languages so as to have greater impact and accessibility.
Background
Looking at all the inspirations (more than 1100 of them!) and ideas already posted in this exciting OpenIDEO challenge made me wonder:
How might we capture and curate all this collective intelligence to create a one-stop-shop to inspire young people to cultivate their creative confidence?
What if we designed a website which had a collection of ideas, resources, tools, methods, stories and daily doses of inspiration… all with the one aim to cultivate creative confidence among young people (and probably spill-over and reach a broader audience)?
I am imagining a slick, interactive, well-designed, user-friendly, extensive, dynamic online portal.
This website will potentially touch upon all the themes that have emerged during the challenge: space to create, attitude and identity, creative catalysts, hands-on making, taking the first step...
Just to get the ball rolling, these are some sections that could feature:
- Creative Confidence: What is it? Why is it important? This would ensure we are all on the same page and have some shared language.
- Methods/ Tools: Toolkits for parents, Toolkits for teachers, Ideas to design "spaces to create", A collection of tools/ methods to boost your creative confidence. This would provide us with practical tools to guide us through the creative process.
- Resources: Templates, session outlines, curriculum design, questionnaires, surveys, creative confidence campaigns etc. This would give us more material to be used at an individual or a community level.
- Stories: An archive of stories of creative confidence submitted and curated by young ambassadors. This would serve as inspiration as we will be continually fed with amazing examples of creative confidence from around the world.
- Blog: A regularly updated blog (like 'field notes' on OpenIDEO) maintained by a group of young ambassadors. This would lead to higher engagement and allow us to document the journey and provide fresh, updated content.
- Forums/ Conversations: Within such a broad topic, it would be great to allow users and the community at large to host conversations around themes related to creative confidence. A teacher sharing her class plan, a parent asking for advice, young people swapping stories… (Check the Café section)
- Get involved: Here we could provide opportunities to turn passive users into active community builders, champions and ambassadors. We could ask them for their ideas or suggest ways to play a more active role - host a meetup, be a guest blogger, be an ambassador for creative confidence in your school, submit your story...
- Social Media channels: Provide links to a Facebook page, Twitter handle, Instagram account, Youtube channel, Pinterest boards… to "meet young people where they are at" and offer more channels for engagement.
Overall, the essence of the idea is to really capture and curate all the amazing ideas that are being shared during this challenge, and make them available and accessible to young people around the world as a powerful online resource they can always draw inspiration from!
Note:
This concept was inspired by themes that emerged from conversations at the OpenIDEO Meetups in Mumbai.
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CommentApril Finney