ConnectFam: Fostering Meaningful celebrations Apart
Team
5 Designers
My Role
Designer
Tools/Skills
Prototyping
User Personas
Timeline
Fall 2023
11 weeks
OVERVIEW 👩🏻💻
In INFO 3450 (Human-Computer Interaction Design), a cornerstone of Cornell’s UX education, students embark on a semester-long project to address real-world problems. One common challenge my team identified was the physical distance many students face from their loved ones. Cornell students, often separated from their families, deeply desire meaningful connections during the holidays.
As a result, our objective was to elevate their celebration experiences by crafting immersive remote solutions.
THE CHALLENGE
How might we leverage technology to simulate closeness, facilitating engaging celebrations despite the physical distance?
THE SOLUTION
WHAT WE ACCOMPLISHED IN A SEMESTER 🤓:
To develop our final design solution, we started with user research to understand students' needs and challenges. Each member proposed and refined design concepts. We created a software prototype to test and visualize our ideas, followed by iterative feedback and an evaluation report. Finally, we presented our solutions at a poster session to an audience of students and faculty.
BRIDGING THE GAP 🌎
When I’m celebrating a holiday away from home, I schedule a group FaceTime with my family so that we can spend time together virtually. My team members, however, have a different method. Some of my team members were international students from China so the 13-hour time distance posed an obstacle in communication. Instead, they record audio and videos for their loved ones to view on their own time and vice versa. Together, we conducted a total of 10 user interviews with students in a variety of class years, disciplines, and hometowns. From that, we gathered 4 major key insights about our users:
Students experience loneliness and miss the in-person support from family. 😢
Students seek life and emotional support from their families. 🧑🧑🧒🧒
Time conflicts serve as the main barrier to communicating with family. ⏰🙅🏻♀️
It’s not as immersive to celebrate special events with family members remotely. 🖥️🧑💻
EMPATHIZING WITH FELLOW STUDENTS 🫂
Condensing our interview insights into a singular persona was challenging, so my team opted to focus on one extreme: The International Student experiencing a 12+ hour time difference.
Design Justifications:
Retroactively, I learned about the specific concept harnessed, Designing for Extreme Users. This is a methodology where you design for edge cases which has specific considerations that benefit all users. While designing for an extreme time difference, we realize users would most likely communicate asynchronously. This led us to focus our efforts on making that experience as immersive as possible.
CURRENT SOLUTIONS ☎️
What does Alyssa use currently to stay connected with her family during the holidays? She uses a variety of tools to accomplish the many ways she connects:
Messaging Apps: Messaging apps like WeChat, Facetime, and WhatsApp excel in communication but lack features for seamless scheduling across time zones.
Sending Gift Packages: Gifting platforms like Amazon and 1-800-flowers.com simplify gift selection and delivery, yet timely and culturally appropriate options can be limited, especially during holidays.
Long Distance Tools: Non-digital items (friendship lamps, care packages) offer physical reminders of connection but miss enhancing existing digital interaction.
REIMAGINING REMOTE CONNECTION 🌐
After auditing current solutions and analyzing our user interviews, we isolated the requirements of a digital connection tool.
Easy to use: It should be accessible to people of all ages: with or without much experience with technology.
Synchronity: It should allow the users to find a time to meet and share updates live.
Festive reminders: It should provide reminders when a holiday nears so people can prepare accordingly.
Sharing: It should provide a place to upload files and video chat for virtual communication.
We individually sketched 15 solutions and shared our best ones with the group.
FINAL STITCHINGS (HIGH FIDELITY PROTOTYPE) 🪡
With the approval of clients and fellow team members, I advanced these mid-fi iterations into our final screens. It did not deviate from the mid-fis besides aesthetics because our mid-fi’s were basically finalized for the grant application and partially shipped to our developers.
Design Justification: The one change I made involved the user display (on the top right corner). In the mid-fidelity explorations, I considered both “Welcome, [User name]” and a profile picture. Thanks to clients’ and fellow designers’ feedback, I combined the two to achieve two things:
The 'Welcome' message establishes a warm and inviting tone, instantly connecting with the user.
The profile photo adjacent to the greeting enhances the sense of identity and ownership, reinforcing that the platform is tailored to the individual user.
POST-OP & KEY TAKEAWAYS 💫
Our client was extremely satisfied with our wireframes and included our preliminary Mentor and Mentee screens in their Meta’s Llama Impact Grant↗ application. We’re still working with GlobalSurgBox to develop the wireframes for the Program Director role.
This experience has imparted new insights to me:
Importance of Persona Development 💁🏻♀️: Through in-depth user research, including interviews, surveys, and usability tests, I gathered valuable insights into our target audience's needs, motivations, and pain points. We crafted personas with rich narratives, providing context about their backgrounds, goals, and challenges, which helped humanize our users and make them more relatable to the design team.
The designer role in a greater team 👩🏻🎨: Collaborating with the software development team was a crucial aspect of our UX project, and I learned the significance of aligning our efforts to create a cohesive user experience. I worked closely with developers throughout the development process to translate our design concepts into functional, user-friendly features. This involved regular communication, feedback sessions, and collaborative problem-solving to address any technical constraints or challenges that arose.
The Software sub-team of EWH! 👩🏻💻