Adobe partnered with The Trevor Project for this in August 2020. The Trevor Project is a nonprofit that helps LGBTQIA+ youth navigate their mental health and ultimately preventing suicide attempts by at risk youth.
How might we create an educational tool to help LGBTQIA+ allies gain knowledge in a fun and guided way to allow them to more effectively provide support to LGBTQIA+ loved ones?
IZM provides an engaging way for users to educate themselves about LGBTQIA+ issues, culture, and history through vetted cinema, literature, and LGBT+ social influencers. This resource provides a fun and guided way for allies and parents of LGBTQIA+ youth to interact with the community in an intersectional manner without placing unnecessary burden onto marginalized folks within the LGBT+ community.
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This 2 week sprint was spent focusing on the framework for the MVP. Basic features and learning elements were the primary focus. I researched and sourced real educational elements to make this project as real as possible.
The home page would use machine learning and hashtags to organize content that would be displayed for each user dependent on their learning interests. The screen offers users a way to easily organize the content on the home page depending on if they want a chance to learn via watching content, reading, or discussing. The home page has access to a users daily learning goals too.
This MVP definitely needs further development on the gamification feature. My idea was to incentivize users to be more engaged in the learning process by offering daily learning experiences to complete based on their personal interests. I believe that having additional ways to track this and bonuses for completing tasks would improve this. This was only a two week sprint so it was outside of my scope to continue to develop. However, I wanted to high light the idea and that I attempted this aspect of the project.
This MVP definitely needs further development on the gamification feature. My idea was to incentivize users to be more engaged in the learning process by offering daily learning experiences to complete based on their personal interests. I believe that having additional ways to track this and bonuses for completing tasks would improve this. This was only a two week sprint so it was outside of my scope to continue to develop. However, I wanted to high light the idea and that I attempted this aspect of the project.
Why is the app named IZM?
The name IZM was chosen as due to the necessity to have intersectionality at the forefront of educating people about LGBTQIA+ Issues.
IZM is the reclaiming of “ism” which is often used in a negative way during discussions of creating a world that is without racism and sexism. Homophobia, transphobia, racism, and sexism are prevalent in the United States. IZM aims to provide educational resources that are intersectional, fun, and would lessen the burden on marginalized folks to educate people.
How did I create the logo?
I accomplished this goal in three ways.
1: I used a Lora typeface which is a bold, striking serif typeface. I liked Lora because it has variation in thickness as well as subtle curves in the “Z” which helped balance the rainbow gradient.
2. I added a gradient layers around the “IZM” text to honor the Pride Flag and the current culturally acknowledged symbolism of the rainbow.
3. The addition of the lavender border for the logo is in honor of the Stonewall Riots in 1969 and the first pride parade where attendees wore lavender armbands and sashes.
Why is the color palette meaningful?
Throughout the app, I used purple and lavender and a rainbow mesh gradient for the background background to honor LGBTQIA+ history in the United States. These colors are symbolic in the gay community. Purple became a symbol of Gay empowerment in 1969 in response to the Stonewall Riots in New York City. A month after the riot, a parade took place and the crowd wore lavender arm bands and sashes. The rest as the would say, is Gay History.
Why is honoring history important to the branding for IZM?
The Stonewall Riots sparked the LGBT Civil Rights Movement and this app is a continuation of those efforts. My intention with this app design was to create an app that help increase people's understanding of the LGBTQIA+ community and to focus on providing resources that were going to bring awareness to those most marginalized in the LGBTQIA+ community which are BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) Transgender Women. Over 50% of black transgender women are murdered in the United States, but these are the same people that started the Stonewall Riots.
Adobe Design for Good was a two week team project. My teammate and I had never used Adobe XD. We quickly discovered that my teammate was unable to run Adobe XD on their computer. This technological problem meant that I had to pivot and ended up completing this project on my own.
Before this project, I had only used Figma. This project allowed me to use of my transferrable Figma and photoshop skills while learning how the XD interface functions.
I was not as fast designing in Adobe as I would have been in Figma. I prioritized the main features to make sure that I had a product that could showcase the design as being primarily an educational tool to help guide users to vetted learning resources.
I did not think about how this app would work from a business perspective. My thought was that this would be a resource to make learning less overwhelming and would be not for profit but this did add challenges of resources needing to be rerouted outside the app which could be problematic if the design was actually implemented. In essence, I learned that it is important during these challenges to still think about a stakeholder or business perspective.
I would have envisioned this product as being a company that provides learning experiences for folks that wish to become better advocates.
If I had more time, I would have created learning experiences within the app that were based on research. These experiences would fit specific learning needs.
I would time developing a learning game based on research. I would want to establish features specific to learning and game components that would be engaging and prompt users to continue their learning experience on a daily basis. Designing this would take considerable research and was well beyond the scope of my two week timeline.
If I was expanding on this project or doing it differently, I would have spent more time developing a prioritization matrix so that I could have expanded on the most important features and polished them. This project definitely lacks a finished look and the user flow is not the greatest.
I would have spent more time making the UI more beautiful. The UI is very basic and the microinteractions in the prototype are not very detailed. I would spend more time focusing not just on the functionality of the project but all the small details that make a user's experience modern, fluid, and visually appealing.
This example showcases moving lines around an image. The image also has a 3d rotation on hover.
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