Explore More

Background

Research, as reported by The Washington Post, suggests that the main source ever-increasing stress among children and teens in school, and everything that comes with it. It could be a bully scouting for lunch money, teachers who intimidate their students, grades, and career-planning.

“What do you want to become when you grow up?”

— Literally every grown-up starting conversation with a child

The million-dollar question… of course, for some, it literally is. Actually, I think most of us in the first world will make more than a million dollars in a lifetime, but, yeah. Whatever. This a crucial decision in a young person’s life. There's lots of help, but it’s scattered on many separate sources, and it’s not very easily accessible and digestible, for parents and children alike. During a workshop we conducted, we found that even professional school counsellors in Malta struggled with the same issues. Different schools may offer similar courses, and courses change frequently, so it’s very hard to keep up-to-date.

Target

The target was to reformat and centralise all of this information in one place. We wanted to create a place that host all the post-secondary school opportunities students may want to pursue, and information about different routes a student may want to go through to get to a career. We tried hard not to allow for the platform to make any decision for any student, so it was important for us to allow the students to browse, and explore different, similar positions, to always show them what is possible for them. 

Challenges

We were mindful of different needs for every student, on different fronts. Rather than creating different personas, since we didn’t really have data to back personas up with, we decided to classify - and in most cases anticipate - different kinds of teens that may use our platform. We didn’t even take parents and counsellors into considerations, which we later found out that both would be using and benefit from this product.

Content consumption

Stereotypically, when we think about presenting information, the first thing that comes to mind is the written format. But aware of different needs, we decided to present information in written and in video format. In fact, most of the budget went into producing hundreds of videos.

Here is one of the videos produced for this project. All videos are produced in Maltese and English for accessibility. Eventually, even the website will be translated into Maltese.

We had to rely on written text, too. But we worked hard to re-write most content that is currently available on school pages and other sources to make it easier to consume, with more relatable language. Below is an example of a short snippet available on Mcast, a leading school in Malta, for information available on their platform about a course they offer, an Advanced Diploma in Performance Arts.

Original version

This programme is an opportunity to form an understanding of various performing arts subjects at an advanced level. Students will become familiar with fundamental principles and skills related to contemporary performing arts practice. The first year of this course focuses on elemental principles in the performing arts. Students will gain the necessary knowledge, skills and competences related to music, theatre, dance, management, production, design and technical aspects of the performing arts in preparation for more independent and focused study. Following successful completion of their first year, learners will develop the aspects of Performance (Acting, Dance and/or Music) and of Performing Arts Management further together with other options. This can allow them to gear up for progression to specific undergraduate programmes, leading to the formation of performing arts professionals, and to career opportunities. This course includes work-related training and practice. Applicants have to be able to work within the industries concerned.

Our version

Some people just like to perform or to be part of a performance. This can vary from creating music to dance, script and lighting amongst other things. If you like to be part of this environment then this is the course for you. You will learn more about music, theatre, dance, management, production, design and technical aspects of the Performing Arts.

Different levels of confusion

Some students know what their end goal is. Others have no idea on earth. Others just really like a particular subject and would feel more comfortable continuing in that direction, but do not know what they’re going to be able to do with that subject. This will define the structure of the web-portal.

The site architecture

Different students have different needs. After conducting some interviews, and discussing with counsellors, teachers, parents and other professionals that guide teens through this process, we decided there are three main ways they will need to navigate;

Level one  -  type of work

First, the test determines if the candidate is inclined to lean towards which kind of work. Is the student leaned towards vocational work, academic or applied?

Level two  -  skills

Then we proceed in determining who the person is, on multiple fronts. We test for their verbal and linguistic skills, their skills in solving mathematical and logical problems, whether they’re inclined towards careers in the arts. In this section, we also test their personal skills, such as bodily kinaesthetic, interpersonal skills, intrapersonal skills, and even naturalistic intelligence.

Level three  -  subjects

Students will then be asked to choose their favourite subjects, quite directly. Students tend to like the subjects they do well in, so this was taken into consideration.

Searching (awaiting funding)

Some students know what they want to pursue, but do not know how. For them, we will soon work on and release a search function, accessible from the homepage. We de-prioritised this feature as we found that most student that tested an early prototype did not notice the lack of it, and never asked for it. A particular student wanted to become a doctor, and they had no problem with browsing to find it.

We will work on it eventually, release it as soon as the project receives some more funding.

The illustration and animations

We didn’t want this website to end up looking like every other website. We wanted it to leave a positive, lasting impression, and rather than immediately being associated with a text-heavy website on the first impression. We wanted it to feel like a website students are attracted to.

Therefore, from the very beginning, we decided to not make use of any stock imagery.

This left us with a real challenge, because other than type and video thumbnails, there wasn’t much else to display.

That is when it hit us. We decided to make the website interactive, build a map with buildings that represent different industries, and the user could interact with these different areas with subtle animations. This was a decision that was very much out of my comfort zone. Being the only creative in the project, I knew it was my responsibility. I am no illustrator, no animator.

I decided to work on an illustration that is simple in style - a very limited colour palette and decided to use basic isometric, would be easily animated and, quite frankly, idiot-proof.

When it got to animations, it was an even bigger challenge. Being a product designer, I thought it would be smart to use Principle. Even though it would probably not be the smartest software to use, it sounded like the best software I could think of, as it exports gifs, and the output is usually well compressed and of relatively good quality. 

So I produced all of the animations. I was very happy with the result! Everything went well, I just missed one little detail; Principle, at the time, did not support gifs with an alfa-channel.

So I had to revert for another option. Tried playing around with After Effects, but I realised it was going to take me really long to build everything as the learning curve seemed steep for me, plus the exports I was making were not very gif compatible. This is when I decided to go old-school… I decided to go for frame-by-frame animations using Photoshop. I knew the result wasn’t going to be as smooth as it was going to be if I used any other software, technique… but I also knew it was going to render the smallest output.

With Principle

With Photoshop
… blood, sweat and tears

The product

We also adapted to product and optimised it for mobile. I have to say, I know that the execution could have been better, but we had one month to create all of the above… in our free time. So we couldn’t be too pixel perfect. Given everything, I am quite proud of this project.

Conclusion

The product was just launched and we started receiving some significantly positive feedback. It’s been a pretty good ride, in one month and a half, I think, we have created something that might help quite some students and give them some more clarity.

Prisms, the NGO behind the project, already started contacting schools and other entities to promote the product with students. This project was done in collaboration with Malta’s Education Department and the Office of the Prime Minister, so buy-in from schools shouldn’t be much of an issue. Eventually, Explore More will also be promoted through other media, such as digital media and TV.

I’m really looking forward to round 2. I would love to fix some things, such as some layouts, introducing search, some animations, and the illustration itself. With some extra funding, perhaps we’d be able to hire an illustrator/animator that could create better work, and I already have someone in mind that would just fit the bill.