ROLE
COLLABORATORS
Rohina Gandhi
Ani Nguyen Le
Kaitlin Chow
SKILLS
Visual Design
Interaction Design
Prototyping
TIMELINE
3 Days
NYC
THE CHALLENGE
Creating a way to help young adults and their parents bond
With one tap, send a personalized grid of life updates on iMessage to easily let your parents into your life. Designed to help young adults strengthen their relationship with their parents over long distance.
Young adults often unintentionally neglect the people they love most
Despite all the technology we have, there are a million things competing for our time. Young adults love their parents, but sometimes don’t have the bandwidth to call or FaceTime very often.
Parents mainly want to know if their kids are okay, but busy lives make it hard to stay in touch
We conducted 10+ user interviews with parents and young adults to learn what both sides needed to feel connected with one another.
Defining core principles to consider the needs of both generations and guide design decisions
We conducted 10+ user interviews with parents and young adults to learn what both sides needed to feel connected with one another.
How can we strengthen the “in-between” moments until you see each other in-person
Everyone will say spending time in person means more than spending time online. But the truth is that texting remains as a really powerful “middle space” between in-person interactions that strengthen a relationship
Apple Care Packages
Keep your loved ones updated in just one tap. With one tap, send a small grid of tiles filled with the most recent updates about your life.
Dynamic widgets based on your activity
When you open the iMessage app, the six widgets in your care package will reflect your most recent activities & inputs. It will draw relevant information from the Apple ecosystem like your Photos app (to show you're eating well), Apple Watch + Health (to show you're working out, sleeping well, + staying healthy), Calendar (flights, availability), and many more.
Effortlessly easy to scan
Keeping in mind that young adults wanted a quick way to send these updates to parents and parents may not always be the most tech-savvy, we designed the curation of the tiles to be very easy to navigate, and the final care package super visually glanceable for parents.
Tap on widgets to toggle and customize
You could do this for location (to provide your parents with your live location or just you city), let them know about how busy you've been recently (light, manageable, vs. heavy workload), and to show them how you've been feeling lately through the 'mood' tile.
Async app to let someone know you’re thinking of them
Inspired by the physical lamp product, the child has have the ability to change the light on their end to pink, which is the preset "I miss you" color. This makes the parent’s lamp also change to pink and they would know they miss her (without words)! We decided this felt oversimplified and didn’t encourage deeper connections.
Mix up the group chat with some fun conversation starters
Sometimes the family chat falls flat, so we explored what fun conversations starters could do to mix things up! We explored sending on-the-spot photos vs. being able to pick from gallery, sending videos or impromptu voice notes, and more. However, after talking to users, it felt like the high effort it required meant it was not a long-term solution.
Sending photos with a voice note attached for more context
Sometimes the family chat falls flat, so we explored what fun conversations starters could do to mix things up! We explored sending on-the-spot photos vs. being able to pick from gallery, sending videos or impromptu voice notes, and more. However, after talking to users, it felt like the high effort it required meant it was not a long-term solution.
Digital ‘hot seat’ because parents love the drama
Parents love to know what’s the latest on relationships, breakups, and life updates. We created a fun prototype where you can select a person to be in the hot seat and they have to answer all the tough questions. This didn’t move forward because the focus was on building healthy and intentional relationships, and this introduced too many problematic potentials.
Uninformed complexity to informed simplicity
Our journey began with a lot of research and exploration, beginning in a place of uninformed simplicity. As we continued to gain insights on the problem, we created a wide variety of solutions. The issue was that they were complex and didn't quite get to the heart of the problem. Then at 2AM the night before our pitch, we finally reached a simple and informed solution — and scrapped everything else.
Behind the scenes of an NYC design competition presenting to designers from Reddit, Spotify, & Google
The overall feedback from the audience was very positive and they loved the quality and craft of our work as well as the prototypes. In the future, we could work on building a story around our solution and tweaking our solution to something that would feel more intentional and thoughtful to the parents.
