I am a UX designer and
researcher who is passionate
about using creativity and
empathy to empower people.
I am a UX designer and
researcher who is passionate
about using creativity and
empathy to empower people.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, people are encouraged to stay at home with hopes that social distancing and isolating will slow the spread of the virus.
People often feel isolated and social interactions have been put on hold. To help people stay connected, we ideated Friendship Farm, an App to motivate interactions.
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Figma
Procreate
Google Slide
Emelia Hughes
Jossie Choi
David Mai
User Research
Ideation
Usability test
Prototyping
Final Report
3 Months
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the daily routines and lives of people worldwide have been affected. People are encouraged to stay at home with hopes that social distancing and isolating will significantly slow the spread of the virus. Although social media has helped people stay connected, social lives and interactions have been put on hold.
Our research on problem context converges to the following problem statement: How might university students struggling with increasing feelings of isolation find motivation to stay connected with friends and family.
We conducted user research, market research, and literature reviews.
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User research
From our user research, we found that people often feel uncomfortable when it comes to initiating interactions, Often, people are likely appreciated when others reach out with simple acts of kindness or encouragement.
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Market Research
Our market research showed that apps working as a personal reminder and encouragement system were most effective when using a clear and simple design aesthetic.
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Literature Reviews
For literature reviews, we looked into articles about the results and insights after interviewing college students the impact of sudden shift to remote learning on their educations.
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Rose
Rose is an extroverted college student always looking to make new friends. Her job and school commitments, however, make it difficult for Rose to remember to reach out to and check in on all of her friends. She finds it hard to make sure that she is checking in on everyone, especially during this pandemi.
Jack
Jack came to UW from a different state and has had a hard time adjusting to Seattle. He spends so much time on his homework and internship and he generally refrains from initiating conversation often with his friends. However, he would still like to reach out and stay connected with his friends from time to time.
We decided to create an app called Friendship Farm. Friendship Farms is designed to allow users to grow animals while nurturing their relationships. Interactions between the users and their friends are reflected as points added up to raise the animal, thus makes the animal enter the next stage. The grown up animals can be presented under the user profile for the public. Our app is both rewarding and entertaining thus motivate users to interact with their friends.
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We conducted usability test with three student participants. In this round of testing and validation, we explored our hypotheses on different features of our current iteration of the app
Pros:
😊 App overall is cute, like the look and aesthetics.
😊 Displaying friends who haven't interact in a while is encouraging for people to reach out
😊 Raising animals gives user incentives to continue using the
😊 Demonstrating user who haven't being contact for a while is good and might improve future interaction
Cons:
😢 Reward different activity with different experience points can help to find the activity to engage.
😢 Some of the features are confusing so maybe add a tutorial or pop-up notification to walk user over different functionalities.
😢 Having some sort of indicator to see how the relationship between contacts has grown would be nice to look back on
😢 Without some sort of organization or spacing with the animals, it could become a bit overwhelming to open the farm.
💫 Add a tutorial that user can always refer to walk them over common functionalities and features.
💫 Use small icons on different friend's profile to show who contacted recently and who need more interactions. For example, using emoji attach on profile such as a heart to indicate the frequency
💫 Color need to be thinner and deeper to show the frequency but make sure to explain what color represent. Also add facial expression of animals
💫 Possibly some sort of special shared animal that can be raised through interactions with a specific person/contact and then go to both users’ farms, especially or users that are on the app connecting with other users
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In the future, if we are going to continue developing Friendship Farm, there are many steps we could take. We would want to add more features, like a dark mode. Another area we would focus on is adding more customization to the app. An example of this would be adding customized interactions to the tracker. We also would like to recognize and come back to our original problem statement and acknowledge that our solution is not a one-size fits all solution for every user.