Our final project from this Creative Entrepreneurship module is to create a digital product concept and pitch it to our peers. The aim of the project is to successfully sell this idea to an audience by creating an exciting and informative presentation which highlights how vital this product is to a potential user base. The presentation will be five minutes long and therefore requires me to concisely summarise the key aspects of the concept.
Before I could create the presentation above, I had to first create a concept to sell. This was difficult in the beginning as I found it difficult to decide what issue my digital product could even solve. However, after a conversation with a friend working as a childcare assistant inspired me to create a digital product for young children. It was interesting to listen to my friend’s observations from working in childcare before, during and after the Covid-19 Lockdown. She noted that many of the children returned from almost two years of relative isolation displaying a disturbing shift in behaviour: increased anxiety, fights with peers.
I decided to research further into studies currently being conducting on children who experienced the height of the Pandemic. From this initial investigation, I discovered that many child development experts fear a lack of socialising and access to green spaces is having a detrimental effect on a generation of children’s social and physical development.
Impact of Increased Digital Use on Young Children
Surprised by these findings, I decided that my digital product would seek to reduce the hours children spend on digital devices and encourage this younger target audience (approximately 4 to 9 year old children) to spend more time outdoors.h
Immediately after finding an issue I wished to solve, I believed I had already hit a brick wall. This is because it seemed (initially) creating a digital product for children was counter-intuitive to my goal of encouraging children to put down digital devices and play outdoors. I decided to create user personas which summarised the interests and frustrations my target audience have in relation to both physical and digital products.
This practice was really useful as it highlighted that the massive success of mobile games like Pokemon Go has proved it is possible to solve the problem statement of creating a digital product that encourages children to play outside.
I have also included a user persona which focuses on a parent’s perspective as the opinions of primary target audience should be considered carefully due to their age. I realised a parent is also generally responsible for deciding what products their child interacts with i.e., downloading or giving permission to download the app.
This user persona highlighted a potential issue: I would have to balance the differing needs of children versus their parents. The product would have to be exciting and fun enough to appeal to a younger audience while also presenting to their parents its ability to enrich a child’s social and physical development.
Understanding the concerns and goals of parents was really useful as it also highlighted how I could evolve my concept to become educational as well as fun.