Foster a stronger relationship between young adults and their far-away parents
Honey is a school project for Social Lab & Leadership by Design course at CCA. Based on common interest and concerns on supporting ageing parents and family relationship building, we foster a team of four to explore this societal challenge, understanding what they are currently facing, and create design solutions around it.
Sunny Babbar
Nicole Wang
Jingyi Wu
Mona Li
8 Month
(Spring 2019)
Design Research
Ideation
UI/UX Design
Prototyping
User Testing
Motion Design
Researcher
Survey design
Visual design
Motion design
User testing
Most of the young adults are living away from their parents, but the conversations between parents and children are more likely to be a "routine task" rather than a meaningful interaction.
In fact, among the 50 million young adults(18-34) living far away from their parents in America, 38% of them reported they lack meaningful conversation with their parent. These unsatisfying conversations lead to misunderstandings, anxiety, and feelings of loneliness on both sides.
Honey is an application that empowers young adults to have a more meaningful conversation with their far-away parents by generating conversation topics related to both parties. It results in emotional well being, mutual understanding, and stronger relationship.
To provide more targeted and customized topics for young adults, Honey requires them to link their social media and insert some basic demographics, hobbies, and other information about their parents.
Each week, Honey will provide a topic list containing 3 categories.
About my life: generated from the user's social media/album/in-App posts to help remind them about what happened during this week.
About my parents: generated according to the parents’ profile to provide more interesting topics to discuss with them.
In-depth topics: some topics to start a deeper conversation with parents and get to understand each other better.
While calling your parents, user can open honey and use it as a cheat sheet and refer to the topics listed.
By sliding it to the right side or press the checkbox, the user can easily mark the topics they covered in the conversation. Or they can slide left to save the interesting topics for next week.
In order to know more about the conversation, Honey will prompt the user a survey after they finish the conversation and ask some quick questions.
All the data will be saved in the Honey system and help to generate an either broader or deeper range of topics for the next conversation.
In order to find the issues arising in their conversations, we conducted both qualitative interviews and quantitative surveys. By working together with colleges and women's federations, we identified areas of need for potential users.
Interview
(including 6 young adults
and 6 parents)
Rounds of Quantitative Survey
Survey Answers
Rounds of Synthesis
According to the research, the current communications between young adults and their parents have 3 basic problems.
Topics covered in the
conversation are repetitive.
We usually talk about what happened in school or the articles my mom sends me.
Health is what they always mention.
She(Mom) keeps asking me about dating or boyfriends, which I really try to avoid.
The conversation is unbalanced
and dominated by one side
My mom talks a lot, so most of the time I just spend the time on the phone listening to her.
They seldom share what’s happening in their lives, instead, they want to know all about me.
Long-distance barriers make it harder to
resonate and show empathy
I don't know what is happening with them, let alone the things they are trying to hide.
I rely on my sister to look after them. She will tell me whether my parents are OK.
At the same time, we initially think the inadequacy in communication will have a more negative impact on parents rather than children, but through our research, we found that children are also suffering from a sense of guilt and regret, especially when their parents are no longer in good health. There is a growing eagerness to improve the relationship through communication and cherish each talk they have.
I should have spent more time and energy with them. If we could talk more with them, I know things would have been totally different.
Before my mom got cancer, I thought she would be healthy forever...
I want the talk to be more in-depth and honest. To tell them things that I used to think “unnecessary.“
I should have been more patient with them.
Reinventing New Reality
After the inevitable separation with children, Parents start to rebuild their mindsets of how they allocate time in their lives and lean towards new lifestyles which they also want to share with their children.
Empathy, but how?
Young adults feel more empathy with parents as they grew up. However, they don’t know how to express or respond to it considering the long-distance between them and their parents.
Before Sudden Change
Young adults want to spend more time with their parents and make use of each opportunity before some sudden changes happen in their parents’ health.
We start our design on the adult children side as they feel motivated to improve the relationship and also are savvier with technology.
We conducted two rounds of brainstorming and came up with 20+ different ideas, ranging from physical objects, smart home devices, AR/VR supporters and mobile/website platforms. After dot voting and testing with the users, we chose several ideas to move forward with.
The initial solution was an educational website for both young adults and their parents to share their concerns and gain skills/information to improve communication. But according to the Feedback, the website is lack of interaction and passive.
I don't think I am going to rely on a website to answer my concerns.
The second solution was a highlight video automatically generated from your social media posts and album photos to keep parents updated on your life. But during the user testing, we heard users saying this may have a negative impact on communication.
I might rely on it too much and not speak to my parents directly at all.
During discussion, we realized it's not about us to tell them the ways to better communicate but to empower the young adult themselves to start talking and sharing with their parents. So we came to our final design solution: a topic generator to help provide topics that improve the richness and meaningfulness of the conversation.
We went through a rapid prototype and 10 rounds of iterations with 16 different testers before we reached our final design. (Thank you Peet's Coffee!)
Considering how topics are generated and what is the information flow of our design, we created an information architecture to analyze and identify the features.
For the visual part, the first few iterations we focused on making it more fun and visually appealing by adding pictures. But through user testing, we realized people need to focus more on communication with their parents, not on the application. Indeed we need to make the App super clean and minimize the distraction.
"You guys have very positive energy! I would certainly use it cause I have a similar conversation with my mother, so I feel like it's an original idea and I give you prompts on it."
