 Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Product Design 101 Design Thinking. We are super excited to talk to you today. Hi, my name is Emily, and I am a Product Manager at CESA. My job is to make CESA work better for all of our teachers, students, and families. Hi, I'm Tracy. I'm the Product Designer at CESA, and that basically means I designed the app to make it look pretty. I make all the graphics and icons for CESA. Hi, I'm Brittany. I'm a Product Manager as well, and I work specifically on CESA for schools, teachers, and principals. Alrighty. So what do we design at CESA? So basically, we design the entire CESA app and stuff in the company, too. So we make all of the tools in CESA that you get to use every day. We also design ways to help teachers learn and also videos and lessons for students to do in CESA. We also use design to figure out how we can do things better on our team so we can all work together better. Design thinking. So design thinking is a mindset. Design thinking is a set of steps that we can use to solve really hard problems so that we can make our world a better place to live. The first one of these is the fact that it's human-centered. So that means design starts from understanding the needs and hopes of people just like you. It is open-minded and open-hearted. Secondly, design thinking is extremely collaborative. More people working on some problem is better than one. And multiple points of view can always help and never, never, never hurt. Design thinking is also optimistic. So we want to believe that we can all create change no matter how big a problem or how small we might be. It's also experimental. What this means is we have to make lots and lots of drafts. And sometimes we're going to take risks and sometimes we're going to fail. And that's okay. The work that we're doing is never actually done because the problem is never fully solved and so we want to keep trying and keep experimenting to learn. So maybe you're wondering what are the steps of this design thinking thing? It sounds pretty cool, but how do I actually do it? So the steps of design thinking are to start with discovery. Then we move on to interpretation. Then we ideate and think of ideas. Then we experiment and then we evolve our idea. So that sounds pretty cool. Those are a lot of big words. We're going to talk about how we use this design thinking process to create a CSAT tool, the labels tool that you all probably are pretty familiar with. So that first step of design thinking is the discovery step. So the discovery step is thinking, who do I want to help? And what problem am I interested in working on? So in the case of the labels tool, we saw all of these awesome examples of student work that our teachers were sharing with us. But we noticed even though it's really cool the things that they're trying to do in CSAT, maybe it's not working very well. You can see, if you try to write a long paragraph with the drawing tool, it's kind of messy and it's hard. Or if you're trying to point something out, like in this photo of the plant, the leaf and the stem, it's kind of hard to read, it's kind of hard to do and maybe that's not really working very well for our students. And so that was the problem that we wanted to make better. Being able to draw and write on top of photos but have it work a little bit faster, a little bit easier and be a little bit easier to read. So the next step that we went into after we decided what problem we wanted to work on and who we wanted to help was talking to, actually talking to the teachers and students that we wanted to help. Because with design thinking, like Tracy mentioned, it's really human-centered. That means you want to work with the people here trying to help because they probably know more about the problem than you do because they're closer to it. And so what we did is we talked to tons of teachers and tons of students and we got all of their feedback and we just got tons and tons of ideas from them describing the ways that CSAC could work better in their classroom, specifically around drawing on top of photos. And then we took all those ideas and we brought them back and we talked about them together as a group. Then we moved to the ideation phase. This is a super fun part of the design thinking process where you get to brainstorm all of your ideas. Every person on the team based on the conversations that they had with the people who were trying to help can bring their ideas and share them. And what we usually do is we get together in a room and we write them all down on post-it notes and we put them up on the wall. So maybe you have some post-it notes or little pieces of paper in your classroom. You can use those tools to do your brainstorm process. And what's so fun about the brainstorm process is we're not trying to decide what idea we want to go with or which one we think is going to be the best. It's just about getting all the ideas out there. Everything we can come up with, whether it seems really small and tiny and easy or really big and crazy, maybe a little bit out there. And then the next part is we get to pick a few of our favorite ideas. So we get all those ideas out there and then together we work to pick a few that we think seem like the best bet to go forward. We don't know for sure that that's going to be the right answer, but we have enough of a hunch that it might be good that we want to start to get some more information. And that's when we go into the experimentation phase. This is the part that we spend the most amount of time in in CSOT and this is when we really do lots and lots and lots and lots of drafts like what Brittany was talking about. So usually we start with an idea for the app by building a prototype. And that prototype is never in code. We always start with writing it, you know, drawing it on a piece of paper just with a pen and pencil or colored pencils or something like that. So you don't even need to know any code in order to make your prototype. So I'm going to show you a picture of what our prototype looked like for the labels tool. So this is what it looks like. I took a screenshot of the CSOT drawing screen and then figured out, okay, where on the screen do I want to add some more tools? Like being able to add text, maybe we want to add emoji stickers, maybe we want to do some other things like that. And see, this is just a single piece of paper and a pen. That's all you need in order to start your experimentation. After we have a lot of sketches, usually there's more than this, not just one, but I picked my favorite to share. We then start to think about, okay, like what, how do we want this to work a little bit more? You know, maybe for the labels tool we want you to just start typing in the box and then maybe you want to be able to pick a color for it so that you can make sure it stands out on any background and you can make it look really nice. Maybe you also want to put a font and so not all your labels look the same or maybe the right labels want to be different for different projects. So the next step for us on this project was making a Google Slides mockup. So maybe many of you use the app Google Slides. On that you can put some arrows, you can type some stuff, you can take screenshots from other apps or find images online and you can kind of match those all up and together to get an idea of what you're trying to do and then you can take that prototype and share it with the people who you think it's meant to be for so we could show this to our teachers and say, or students and say, hey, what do you think of this? What questions do you have? What feedback do you have for me? And then we start to work on some early code. So that's when the three of us get to work with people on our engineering team to turn the ideas that we have on paper into some code in the app that we can actually play with. And this is when we learn a lot, a lot, right? Because we want to make sure that the app is easy to use. It has all the tools that you want. But we also want to make sure it's not too hard or complicated to use. So in our early version, we had this little button that you would hit Add Text down here. And then you would add some text. And then you'd get all these different kinds of crazy options. And when we were thinking about it, we're like, maybe that's a little bit hard for little kids to be able to do on their own. That's not what we want. So how can we make this simpler? So then we, this is another example, we put all the fonts in the world in here. And it's like, maybe that's just like too long of a list to have to go through to pick something that looks good for your label. How can we make that faster and easier? And we learned this by testing it out ourselves and being OK with throwing away some work that we did in order to make it better. That's like all those drafts like what Brittany was talking about. And then we thought we had this idea for the labels of maybe we want to have some preset label styles. So that way it's just one tap in order to make your label go from looking pretty boring to looking pretty cute and nice. So we use Google drawing to come up with some different samples of what we might want those preset styles to look like. And then we shared those around with people on the team to get their feedback. Is this enough different types of fonts? Do we need more? Do we need less? What's going on? And then we got to be in the super fun part of the prototyping and experimentation phase, which is when we get to pretend to be a student. So everybody in the entire company gets a project, which is to make something using the new tool that we're developing. So the project was to take a photo from your weekend and then use the labels tool to tell us what's in the photo. Pretty, pretty simple, probably pretty similar to stuff that you're doing today in the labels tool. And so that's when we all got to experiment and everyone got to share their feedback with us. So folks on the engineering team, on the teacher success team, on the school partnerships team, everybody got to share with us how they thought our tool was working. And we got to take all that feedback and figure out how we could make it better. And we know sometimes when you're working really hard on something, you get some feedback and it hurts your feelings a little bit, right? Because you think your thing is really good, working really nice, but somebody else is really not understanding it. And sometimes it does hurt your feelings to do that. But in the end, it will make the product that you're designing much better if you can take that critical feedback and turn it into something positive. And then we experimented more in order to make an actual feature that you all get to use. We probably did 200 versions just for the labels tool. So it was testing and testing and testing and testing and fixing until we felt like it was good enough that we would want to share it with our students. And then we got to share it with you. Hooray! We were so excited to share this tool with you and see the types of amazing work that you were going to create. So the last step of the design thinking process is the evolution step. So that's sharing what you design with the people you made it for and then getting their feedback because it's possible. Even after you did all that work of experimenting, there's still something that you missed. And then what's awesome about the design thinking process is you can just start it back over and figure out how you can make the second version and make it even better than the first. So those are the steps of design thinking. And we have some ideas for you. OK, so how can we practice? Well, great for all of you. We have a special design challenge for you that is in the Activity Library right now, which is to design the next CESA class icon. As you may know, your teachers may be using some of these in your class right now. And you guys get to draw the next icon by using the drawing tool and create whatever you want. And we will all decide on whichever one is... Well, actually we're going to decide on three. So our top three will actually make it into the product. I will go ahead and design them. And you can see them in the product within a couple weeks. Yep. So fun. So yeah, so you can take what you learned in this design thinking webinar and design an awesome class icon that can be shared with classrooms all around the world. Yay. So now we are ready to take your questions. We want to know what you want to know about designing an app, designing a CESA, or design thinking process. So let's take one minute and you can talk to your teacher. They can type in the questions box in the bottom corner of the webinar software and tell us your questions and make sure to include your grade level and class name and location in your question so that when we answer your question, we know who it's from. So take a minute and type the questions box. And I'm Angela, I work at CESA too. And I'm really excited. We already have some great questions coming in. So we're going to give you a little bit of time to type those questions in, but I want to give a little shout out here to some classrooms. I know that we have Ms. Volux class from Pennsylvania, Ms. Vicks class in Oklahoma. We've got Glenbrough students in Streamwood, Illinois, Ms. Carlson's class, Mr. Kay's class in Pittsburgh. We've got Ms. Gillis, Ms. West, Rachelle's second grade class. So many classrooms are here. We've got Ms. Donovan's class, so many classes, so many classes that are typing in questions. And we're not going to get to answer all of them, but we're going to have some great ones to start with. So we'll try to get through as many as we can in the time that we have today. And you can also reach out to us if you have other questions. So we're going to start with Ms. Friar's class, who are third graders in Oklahoma. And they want to know how do you code an icon which is created for this challenge? Oh, that's a great question, Tracy. Okay, so I, as the designer, I actually don't do any code, which is great for me. So I actually take drawings from my sketchbook, just like how you can submit through the activity library and draw out whatever I think of. And then I use programs such as Sketch or Adobe Illustrator and I draw that on the computer myself. And then I go talk to an engineer to bring that to life with their code. Great. We have Ms. Jackson's third grade class and Kansas wants to know how long does it take to fully design something new? Oh, boy. That's a great question. So it depends on how big or small the feature is. Sometimes a feature like the labels tool, we were probably working on that one for about four months. But maybe something a little bit smaller like the class icons that you can design. Probably Tracy will work on those for a few days. All right. We have another question from the fifth grade few tourists from Troy, Michigan. They want to know how do you persist through setbacks, especially if your feelings have been hurt? Yeah. So one, so especially if your feelings have been hurt, I think one thing that helps is to take a little bit of stuff back and reflect a little bit on your own and think about ideas for how you can make the product better. Using the feedback that you've heard from people and really focus on making sure that the product is as good as possible for the people who are using it. I think another sort of quick top tip is maybe if your feelings are hurt, maybe what you want to do is just take a minute to yourself to take some deep breaths so you can feel a little bit more calm before you want to try and address that feedback. That's a great tip too. Okay. So many questions. But this is a great one from Ms. Hart's class in Stewartville, Minnesota. They're fifth graders. How did you come up with the name CESA? That's a great question. So when we were first working on CESA, we wanted to make sure we had a name for the app that was fun and that reminded us of school and that wasn't too long to have to spell out. So we did this same design thinking process to brainstorm a ton of ideas. Probably a few thousand different possible ideas. And then we each voted, there are only a few people at the company at the time. I think there were only four of us. And then we each voted on our favorites and CESA rose to the top because we really liked that it reminds us of school and is short and fun and sounds nice but also speaks to the fact that you're sort of the work that you're sharing and CESA is going from school to home and school to home and back and forth. It's like that up and down, all sorts of that communication. I love it. Ms. Stonehouse's class is a fourth grade class in White Bear Lake, Minnesota. And they want to know, Tracy, where do your icon design ideas come from? Ooh, that's a great question. They come from all sorts of things. So I started when I did these specific icons. I wanted to make sure that most subjects or some subjects were represented as well as some fun ones just for fun that kind of represented school or what I thought of school back in the day. So you can see like the art one is symbolic of like a palette and painting and then maybe some planets for science or something like that. I just wanted to make sure that there is enough for everyone that everyone can choose something for themselves. Here's a question from Ms. Bell's second grade class. How can we get... Well, let's see. I was reading the wrong question. There's so many questions coming in. Sorry, hold on a second. Let me go back to that question from Ms. Bell's class. Why was CISA made? Ooh, that's a great question. So we, when we first started working on CISA, we actually were working on a totally different app before its name was ShadowPuppet. And it was a way for to make movies out of your photos and videos. And it turns out a lot of teachers were using that app to create things with their students. But then it was really hard to share the awesome things that they were creating home to their families. And so we had some teachers writing us saying, oh, like we really like making these videos, but it's so hard to share. And so that's kind of where the first idea for CISA came from. We're like, okay, we know that students are creating amazing things using photos and videos and drawings. But it's really hard to share those with their teacher and their classmates and their family. How can we make that better? So we worked with 20 classrooms to come up with the idea for CISA and to test the prototype. Remember that experimentation phase? We did that with 20 classrooms around the United States and got their feedback and did all of that before we even had the first version of CISA out for everyone. So great. I love that story. So we are right at our time. There's so many questions that we have to answer, but I am going to give a couple of shout outs. We've got Ms. Patrick's class, Ms. Walsh's class, Ms. Richard's class. We've got Ms. Gaugher's class, Ms. Peterson's class, Ms. Hart's class, Ms. Simon's class, so many classrooms have been watching and we are thrilled and honored that you have spent time with us and there's so many more that I didn't even mention, but we appreciate you taking time out of your busy, busy day to join us and we are so excited to see what class icon you design in CISA. So thanks everyone for coming today. Bye. Thank you. Bye.