MentorN00b : matchmaker matchmaker make me a match!

I have been doing a lot of little projects for one off events lately.  Like this badge claim page I made for the recent Mozilla Summit:

 

Or the one that I made for Mozilla Festival:
 
Usually we try to make one - offs more meaningful by actually doing some iteration on them or using them as a use case to inform the core product that we are actually working on.  So for example, I will probably work with our development and design team to figure out how to incorporate these kinds of claim pages into BadgeKit and will use the feedback that we got by standing and watching hundreds of people "test" out the sites as a usertesting and research exercise.

For these two events we also made something that I would put in the category of "schwag". Which, yeah - can totally be fun to make, but kind of usually feels a little meaningless. Here are the buttons that my teammates Chloe and Emily and I made for the events to help people to get interested in Open Badges:

This exercise, (I have to admit - quite surprisingly) turned out to be a meaningful design exploration that keeps on giving to us things to think about on the badges project. As Emily explains in her blogpost, the badges took on another life in practice. People hacked them and used them to give peers a glimpse of their identity - but not just identity with a capital I - really a deeper, more nuanced thing - how people self identify.

One day, I was in a coffee shop with Atul and Mike - thinking about the badges schwag and we were kind of doing our usual brainstorm of - wouldn't it be cool if ..... - and we came up with an idea for a prototype that could have pretty tight parameters. I would categorize this as a prototype that's not designed to scale. 

What we realized was - that at these events we would be seeing people with different kinds of expertise and desires and how in a perfect world we would match-make button wearer's so they could help each other out to learn skills. So for example, my button said that I was a javascript n00b and if Mike's button said that he was a javascript nin.ja we could be paired together.

What the three of us started to hack on was an app - where people could sign in, state their interests and then get paired with a like-minded friend to help mentorship. I could imagine this being something that could be taken further - so after a match is made, a mentor could help a n00b to develop a learning map/goal or trajectory and suggest or create badges for the n00b to work towards. Using the tools offered in BadgeKit, the mentors could then provide peer assessment for the n00bs. Additionally, the feedback loop could be closed by the n00b then giving the mentor through various kinds of mentor badges. This would in essence develop a mentor - n00b community and give participants the ability to always identify as somewhere on the spectrum for different skills or activities as mentors and/or n00bs. I particularly like this idea - that someone could be a mentor and a n00b at the exact same time. 

Here is a mockup that I worked on to start to express the idea:

We haven't gotten super far with the prototype, but I could see this as something that might be interesting to test out with the Hive or the mentor community activities at Mozilla.

Rethinking the Architecture of Webmaker

A few weeks back a bunch of us at Mozilla  had a design sprint to begin thinking through what it would mean for someone to come to Webmaker.org and experience it as user-not a visitor. We started to come up with a few ideas that push forward our thinking on Webmaker as a product. Some of this thinking is building off our work on Designing the Platform to teach the next generation of webmakers. Here are some takeaways from our latest conversations:

In order for us to convert visitors to users, a few things need to happen:

1. The information architecture of the overall site needs to be revisited
We can't think of webmaker.org as a regular website: we need to develop a strategy for people to immediately engage with making something on the web. This will require us to significantly rethink how we are framing our tools and content. The broad strokes view of this here is that overall, there needs to be less of a focus on tools and more movement towards the opportunity to make something.

The current architecture:

The drafty future sitemap:

click for a legible view!

So the key takeaways here are 1) we are moving away from challenging the user to choose between tool and project- they are at webmaker to make cool stuff- and learn while they are doing that- so let's make it easy for them and 2) overall this is a more personalized experience- there are user profiles, dashboards, content that is unique to the user based on their webmaking history, etc.  You can check out the etherpad where we are working through the details here.


2. Single sign on needs to be implemented 
In order to implement a lot of our vision for Webmaker, we need a single sign on- and a built in value for that sign on. Right now the singular value proposition for signing in to Thimble is badges. Yeah, it's more than just a gaming point, it's embedded assessment- but we could be doing so much more - users could get analytics on their webmaking-what are their trends? The kinds of things that they make on a regular basis-only Popcorn projects?, what kind of code do they prefer? JS, pure HTML? How many remixes have they made? The sign on can happen at several different touchpoints- the landing page- or via a button in the universal navigation.

So the landing page might end up looking more like this:

 or this:

 

This will affect users in several ways, the least of which---they can actually be "users" of webmaker.org- save and share their work, but it also takes me directly to #3:

3. The universal navigation needs to be implemented across all properties

We currently have a version of what could become the universal navigation implemented in Thimble:

 

Eventually, this is going to live across all webmaker properties and  transform into a more dynamic navigation/dashboard/ toolbar. So for example, instead of just linking to "Projects" it can link to "My Projects"

 
4. More user- centric content needs to be prioritized 

User centric content will live across Webmaker, so that it becomes a more social platform- and importantly, taps into the social platforms and places that people are already inhabiting on the web outside of webmaker.

One thought is to make a dashboard- that offers users a conceirge to help them figure out what they want to do, but also provides them data about their work, suggestions of things to make based on their usage habits.

 

Another thought it to build out the gallery to be more social and user friendly- so that might mean that a user can follow other users, or recommend peers for badges, create working groups or collaborative hacking sessions. But for starters---we need a gallery, one that integrates user generated content and mozilla starter projects. It will need to be curated but this can also be done dynamically based on user preferences and interactive filters.

There will also be places for people to store their work, collect assets from across the web and initiate collaborative webmaking.

5. Identify touchpoints for "teaching" or peer mentoring.

This one is a little bit less defined than the others, mainly because we need to work with the Learning/ Hacktivators/Hive/ Community teams to identify the need and opportunity here. In general since we see webmaker as a self directed, online experience similar to physical events like the Mozilla Festival-we want people to be able to share lessons learned easily with their peers.  This probably won't mean one section roped off for educators, but an embedded experience, perhaps when a user makes something-they can share a video documenting their process with a friend--- maybe on publish you are giving a hacktivity kit - there is a lot of interest here, and a chance to be innovative.

So that's the general direction of our thoughts over from the UX camp. It's a lot and it's messy but it's all good. Would love feedback. This week I will be working on building out the Webmaker Product vision. Much of this might morph into something else- but I want to document it so we can trace our thinking. I will post on the vision next week.

Lot's of good thinking is happening all around, however, I recommend reading these posts by Chris Appleton that focus on how we might approach Projects, and User Accounts:

Project Discovery

Workshops - a Space to Create

Redesigning Webmaker