Apps for Good

Fluxx

2017

Tool curation

Design research

Facilitation

Content design

Readymag

Context

Apps for Good have reached 130,000 students in over 1,100 schools worldwide, teaching them how to code and work together.

The Fellowship is a way for students to stay involved in the AfG ecosystem after the course is finished, giving them opportunities in digital ranging from event hosting and peer mentoring to meeting the development teams of household names like Spotify. AfG want to grow the Fellowship exponentially in the next few years, from around 300 at the point of my working with them to 5000 by 2022.

Problem

How to prioritise and test the hundreds of ideas each staff member and participant has for expanding the fellowship and retaining fellows?

Response

Create easily replicable methods to test long-term strategic choices for user desirability, technical feasibility, and cost viability.

Running real-world experiments with actual customers or users is a quick and cheap way to determine whether your idea is worth doing on a larger scale.

Having a consistent framework for deciding which experiments to run based on their cost and expected impact implicitly introduces capitalisation into thought processes, allowing for strategic thinking at smaller scales.

As well as creating the tools, I ran workshops introducing the team to the structure and creating experimental plans with them.

I also curated a list of specialist tools to use at each stage in the design structure.