Identified themes

By combining and analyzing our findings from the empathy mapping & affinity mapping I discovered four clear themes.

• Frustration due to lack of social contact

• Missing friends

• Missing activities and hobbies

• Fears someone in their family getting affected more than themselves

🔎 The process

Research statement & objectives

The aim during the project was to get an understanding of how the ongoing covid-19 pandemic has affected children's mental health.

We set the following research objectives:

• Understand in which way the ongoing pandemic has affected children's everyday life.

• Discover a connection between social distancing and children's mental health.

• Unfold how social distancing has affected children’s mental health.

• Understand their need associated with the covid-19 pandemic to create a solution.

Research methodology

For this project we used a qualitative approach to the research phase, with the following methods:

• One-on-one semi structured interviews intertwined with play

• Desk research

Since our research objectives could be sensitive and our target group is children between the ages of 9-14. We had to be extra mindful on how to approach the research phase. To truly understand the children’s feelings around the subject, our approach would require strong rapport and trust between us and the children.

💽 Analysis and synthesis process

The first step was to transcribe the interviews in its entirety in order to help us analyse & synthesize the raw data.

It’s important to remember that not all users are comfortable in an interview setting, therefore to avoid yes/no responses I crafted our questions to be open ended. I adapted the TEDW framework to our questions. Which led to great results and open conversations regarding the sensitive topics and helped us to truly grasp the users pain points without leading them.

Empathy mapping

To deepen our empathy with the user, I created 4 empathy maps for each person interviewed to further understand their pain points & needs.

Insights to need statements

I facilitated an insight workshop with the team where we had a silent 30 minute brainstorming session, writing down all the insights we could come up with. To conclude the insight process the team voted on the most valid insights by using the Dotmocracy method.

How might we

I dismantled our insights & their needs into actionable How Might We statements. This helped frame the next phase of the project, ideation.

💡 Ideation

I facilitated a brainstorming session for 15 minutes where every team member was encouraged to sprout out every possible idea they had on a sticky note. I put a short time constraint on the brainstorming session in order to avoid overthinking and possibly miss out on great solutions due to it being ‘unrealistic’.

As we wrapped up the brainstorming session we had a lot of great ideas and solutions. In order to move forward and not get stuck on which solution to pick - we once again used Dotmocracy.

Rent-a-hobby is born

Rent-a-hobby is an online service where children could rent hobbies, for an example they could rent sport equipment, video games, art supplies, board games, - pretty much any hobby you could imagine. Aswell as creating an engaging online community where children can learn new hobbies (tutorials, forums) and interact with influencers within those fields. As the brief didn’t require to design a solution but was focused on conducting User Research & synthesizing, we didn’t have enough time to design our solution. It’s something I strive to come back and finish in the future.

🎨 Post-it art

With this in consideration we decided to take a playful approach to our qualitative research. The idea behind the post-it art game was to create a playful and happy environment. Partly to build up trust before interviews, and partly to create an opportunity for the kids to express their thoughts and feelings about COVID-19 in an abstract way. After the trust had been built we conducted one-on-one semi structured interviews in order to go deeper on the subject.

We had four main topics for the interview, our intended goal was to encapsulate how COVID-19 affected the social and mental spectrum for children.

Affinity mapping

I continued the synthesis process with Affinity mapping. Discovering themes and then clustered interesting data points related to that specific theme. I also took this chance to highlight relevant quotes.

Desk research top findings

🎯 Functions

• Rent sport equipment, video games, art supplies, board games, books etc.

• Explore new hobbies via YouTube/TikTok

• Campaigns with popular influencers

✅ Benefits

• Children can express themselves creatively

• Children might not feel as isolated with access to many activities

• Children can connect with friends easier

Reflections

📄 Main topics, sample questions & moderation guide

Here is a link to the moderation guide.

⚡

Since it was difficult to recruit kids during the special conditions that existed during the time we worked on the project. I wonder if our findings would have been different if we had more recruits for our interviews from different backgrounds and mixed genders. We would also like to flesh out our idea & concept more - is there any other areas that we didn't think of that we could cover with the concept?

⚡

Another interesting point that I would like to research & test is - Can it be possible to apply a digital solution to an physical/mental problem? E.g, can a digital solution compensate for the lack of physical touch?

Let’s chat over a fika! ✉️

markus.bucat@hyperisland.se