Project Objective
Over the Industrial Design Course of the semester, we’re guided to use contextual design method to design an experience related to the topic of 'communication'. We picked up an issue that is close to us, the experience of remote communication between parent and child no longer living together. Our goal is to solve parent’s insecurity caused by not living together with their children and increase the intimacy between them.
Product Features
No more worries for missed-calls
Around provides the possible activity that the user is doing by integrating the calendar and analyzing the surrounding information, such as GPS, velocity.
Call your beloved ones on the right time
Around offers the current state (e.g., at work, in meeting, in class.) and the best contacting time by analyzing previous contacting pattern.
The most active family group chat ever
Users can get access to family group chat quickly all the time by our considerate interface design. Besides, you can grow a family tree by chatting a lot and completing family missions.
Have a healthy life with family missions
You can complete the mission (exercise, eat fruit and vegetable, sleep earlier, etc.) generated by our system automatically or create your own mission. Share the wonderful moment together with your family!
The Process of Designing around
My Role in Team
Research, Interaction design, Visual design
In the research phase, we did the interview, interpretation, affinity map, and work model together. Then, each of us think of several ideas from our refined insights and iterated problem clarification.
I came up with an idea of family chat app which ended up as our final solution. I drew the wireframes with my teammates helping refine them. Furthermore, I took charge of creating the high fidelity designs for the mobile application. Lastly, I made an interactive prototype of the application with Marvel.
Research
Interview, Contextual Inquiry, Interpretation, Affinity Map, Work Model
For our research, we first conducted semi-structured interviews (5 parents and 5 children) to know the current situation of remote communication between parents and children. However, we found that we lacked enough information to fully understand the problems after we did interpretation and affinity map. That prompted us to do a second round of semi-structured interviews (4 parents and 4 children) with refined questions and contextual inquiries, trying to find out more data. The second round went quite well, and we successfully turned the raw data into work models.
Work Model
Artifact model
Culture model
Flow model
Insight / Problem Clarify
- Children have a regular pattern and behavior of daily life.
- Parents take care of their children and try to understand their lives through the channel of phone, Line, and Facebook.
- Most of our interviewees said that they like to talk on the phone the most with the fact that using line more frequently though.
- Parents get anxious when they can’t know children’s pattern and behavior of daily life.
- Anxiety also aroused when children are out of daily pattern.
- Parents worry about children’s health a lot, trying to make them aware of it by constantly harping on about it, which may not be the best to communicate in this way.
Vision / Storyboarding
Firstly, we discussed our vision and did the storyboard together, then turn it into a vivid footage (filmed by Po-Yeh Chou).
Ideation
Each of us came up with several ideas by KJ method at first, then we evaluated which functions to be left with weighted matrix.
Wireframe Ideation
During the phase of wireframing, I took on most part of the work redrawing many times with team members' help in doing heuristic evaluation.
Final Design / User Flow
