Pass The Mic

Creative Reaction Lab x Adobe • 2021

Rallying Youth Leaders Through Community

Pass The Mic was recognized as a 2021 finalist in the 7 day Creative Jam with Adobe. It is an iOS-based app that aims to develop and support emerging youth leaders through mentorship, learning opportunities, and discussion. College students will have the opportunity to connect with leaders and learn from individuals with different walks of life through our chatrooms and webinars.

What is Pass The Mic?

Pass The Mic is a place where you can join in on live town hall meetings, engage in webinars, have safe conversations in the chatrooms, and join audio or text based group discussions on important, hard hitting topics that matter to you.

Webinars: activities, discussions, videos that earn you badges as you progress as a mentor — **Webinars**: activities, discussions, videos that earn you badges as you progress as a mentor

Mentor Profile: bio, badges, tagged passions/interests, community

Town hall: listen as active leaders in the community discuss current events, trending topics on social issues, share experiences — **Town hall**: listen as active leaders in the community discuss current events, trending topics on social issues, share experiences

Chatrooms: be a listener, take turns speaking, or ask questions to the question board to inspire conversation — **Chatrooms:** be a listener, take turns speaking, or ask questions to the question board to inspire conversation

Challenge:

Create a mobile app that helps mobilize youth leaders working towards equity.

Targeting the youth up to the age of 26, our aim was to empower individuals to redesign justice movements in their community to affect real change.

High-Level Goals

Build consciousness surrounding race & ethnicity in US
Shape community for cultural healing, safety, collective mobilization
Empower individuals through the power of offering resources

My Role

This project was in partnership with Melissa, another Product Designer in NYC, to design this app from the beginning to end including research, sketches, prototypes and passing off to judges.

Kick-Off

Forming our intentions

On a search for our long-term goal, we ran a series of exercises to address any initial questions we had surrounding our product and organized our conclusions to give us a better scope of what our challenge was.

Sprint Questions categorized into 3 major themes: safety, equity, and engagement — **Sprint Questions** categorized into 3 major themes: safety, equity, and engagement

Long Term Goal

Give youths a safe space and platform to voice their concerns and ideas regarding race and social issues in their communities.

Sketching

Searching for inspiration

To understand the landscape of the problem space, we conducted some research on existing products to learn about solutions that have already been created and find the holes where our product could fill in.

Notable themes to emphasize:

Community
Mentorship
Open Discussions

Creative Reaction Lab was our inspiration to learn about how to educate and provide information to the focused communities — **Creative Reaction Lab** was our inspiration to learn about how to educate and provide information to the focused communities

ADPList demonstrates how individuals can connect with mentors in their communities — **ADPList** demonstrates how individuals can connect with mentors in their communities

Houseparty illustrates how to connect individuals in a personal but safe and open space — **Houseparty** illustrates how to connect individuals in a personal but safe and open space

Fostering Genuine Connections

Building a community was the leading focus for this project so we ensured that we created an equitable and safe experience for mentors and mentees to unite common interests for a social cause. Although we wanted to incorporate different functionalities to support a community, supporting a mentor and mentee relationship was most important.

Outcomes

Onboarding

Walkthrough - guides users through 3 main features

Sign Up - links school affiliations and profile choice to identify as mentor vs mentee

Preferences - users can select 5 topics of interest to be matched with other like-minded individuals

Evolving from mentee to mentor

Mentees level up by completing webinars that include videos, activities, and discussions and earn a badge upon completion. As badges rack up, they’re one step closer to becoming a credible mentor for others.

Townhalls

Listen in on active conversations hosted by community leaders/mentors speaking on hard-hitting topics that may be difficult to discuss. Anonymous messages/questions can be sent to the question board for hosts to answer.

Chatrooms

A “microphone” is passed around in the chatrooms as youths are able to hold open conversations and share experiences, struggles, and personal revelations while moderators monitor the dialogue.

The Good

We were able to deliver a product that met our goals and achieved the prompt by ultimately trusting the process and heavily doing our due diligence in regards to our research.

The Bad

As we were on a time crunch to pass off our project to judges, we didn’t have the opportunity to spend much time on the visual designs which ended up being one of our downfalls.

What I’d do differently

Spend more time on our visual designs to construct a more curated and intentional color palette.