Product design for nine-year-old girls
With all the talk these days about women in tech and women in product, it’s great to see the Girl Scouts doing something to get girls excited about the industry.
Like many women, I spent time as a kid as a Girl Scout — selling cookies, eating Thin Mints until I was sick to my stomach, baking cookies, and many other wholesome (and less-cookie-intensive) activities.
Sadly, I have absolutely no memory of the specifics involved in earning any of the 12 merit badges carefully sewn onto my vest by my very patient mother. The images on them lead me to believe that I earned them for camping, arts-and-crafts, stargazing, and patriotism of some sort. The usual scouting activities. They were educational, but not particularly relevant to helping me discover what I wanted to do with my life.
While not an avid follower of the organization, I’ve noticed that the Girl Scouts seem more relevant recently. For instance, there was a recent campout on the Whitehouse lawn as part of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move Outside campaign; they recently made the news when they returned a gift earmarked for non-transgender girls only; and these days, a girl can set up an online store to sell cookies to gluttonous far-flung friends and relatives. The badges themselves also seem to be more interesting than I remember.
Specifically, I’m excited about the Junior Product Designer badge, which I happened to learn about when a colleague asked if her nine-year-old daughter could talk with me about it.
Product design for nine-year-olds? I’m all ears!
My colleague lent me the eight-page pamphlet so I could take a closer look. While it wouldn’t replace formal training in design, it’s not a bad overview if you want to boil down the field to eight pages written at an elementary-school level.
I wish I could share the whole booklet with you, but I’m pretty sure the Girl Scouts wouldn’t be happy with that. (Note to anyone from the Scouts reading this: I would love to link to where on your website people can buy this guide, but cannot find the right page.) So instead, I’ll give a little insight into the design process they’re teaching and how it compares with what my team does as professional Product Designers.
The guide lays out five steps:
- Observe what makes a great product
- Be an innovative detective
- Figure out what’s working and not working
- Innovate to find solutions
- Mess up so you can try again!
Examples are all products familiar to kids, like backpacks and water bottles. The guide uses these products to explain the fundamentals of designs. For example, they show how designers use callouts to annotate a visual.
The pamphlet instructs girls to carry a notebook to jot down ideas.
While none of these approaches are rocket science, they’re important skills designers use all the time.
Aside from its focus on kid-specific products, how does this process stack up against the kind of design adults get paid for?
Let’s start at the beginning. I love how optimistic it is to start out by focusing on what makes a product great. As a professional, we’re usually what’s not working. For instance, people forget to show up for a haircut, so you fix the situation by sending them a reminder text message. The detailed instructions do ask girls to balance positive feedback with ideas for improvement, so overall this step is fairly accurate.
Next up, girls get to be an innovation detective. This term makes me want to reprint my business cards and update my LinkedIn profile. Laura Martini, Innovation Detective has a nice ring to it. But what does it mean?
This step roughly translates to doing qualitative research around your topic. I won’t go into too much detail, since I’ve written about design research in the past. However, I will share that the pamphlet has practical tips for needfinding: observe people using the product, interview someone about what they like about a product, making sure to ask why, and take photos to help make more detailed observations of how people use a product. Two for two so far, nice work Girl Scouts.
Third, the guide instructs you to figure out what’s working and what’s not working. This sounds suspiciously like step #1, but closer inspection reveals that they’re referring to something that designers call synthesis. Synthesis is the most abstract part of the design process, and essentially refers to the process of taking all of your observations and looking for patterns in the data. For instance, one way to structure observations is by making a timeline (someone makes breakfast by going to the cupboard to get a bowl, then they go the pantry to get cereal, etc.)
Synthesis takes years of practice to truly master, but it’s ultimately the most strategic contribution design can make to product development. Of all the steps, this one seems the most difficult to translate to an elementary level, and I’m not sure the guide is entirely successful. For instance, it asks girls to compare five similar products (like cereal boxes) and compare them. But it only asks them to write down examples of “two problems the products solve, and two problems that have been overlooked.” Why not ask girls to put them into different categories (kids vs. adults; bags vs. boxes; sold at eye level vs. ground level) and work out trends between the categories?
Innovate to find solutions, the fourth step, is commonly where non-designers think that the design process starts: jumping straight into solution-finding mode. Thankfully, the Girl Scouts have prepped the junior designers to have a deep understanding of a product’s issues before attempting to fix them. The guide shows girls a few different ways to brainstorm creative solutions, meaning that you think of many ways to solve the problem rather than just going with your first idea. Given the time constraints and politics of real-world designing, this step often gets cut short for in-house designers, when a team must build their first idea rather than hold out for a better idea. But innovative thinking is something we all aspire to, and is absolutely the right way to teach design. Do as I say, not as I do?
Finally, the guide instructs girls to mess up so they can try again. This advice is good for two reasons: failure is how actual designers and engineers learn to make their products better and fear of failure is often cited as a something that holds women back in their careers. By correctly framing prototyping and failure as an opportunity to learn, the guide teaches girls a valuable lesson, even if they don’t decide to become professional product designers. I’d give the guide full marks for this step.
The most glaring difference between the Girl Scouts’ design process and professional design would be its focus on physical products, outside the context of a service ecosystem. This doesn’t necessary mean a website or app (although in today’s world, it’s hard to avoid those). It means thinking about the physical object as one touchpoint in an entire user journey. For instance, what if the water bottle weren’t just a water bottle, but part of a water-delivery service? Or when you bought that water bottle, it funded clean water for a child in another country?
To be fair, tackling the concept of service design in an eight-page guide is a tall order. All-in-all, it’s exciting to see the Product Design field being introduced to Girls at a young age. Product Design offers an opportunity to use technical and creative skills to help people, something kids (and adults!) should be aware of when thinking about what they want to do when they grow up.
Thanks, Girl Scouts, for doing your part to show girls what opportunities in product and tech are open to them!
Laura Martini is the Director of Product Design at a biotech company in the SF Bay Area. She credits her five years in Girl Scouts for a lifelong addiction to Thin Mints and the ability to properly use a Swiss Army knife.
p.s. If you enjoyed this post, I highly recommend this gem: Explaining graphic design to four-year-olds.
