Cue - Read the Room, Learn the Cues

Inspiration

Social situations are full of unspoken signals such as a shift in posture, a flicker of discomfort, a moment of genuine warmth. For most people, reading these cues is second nature. For the estimated 1 in 5 people who are neurodivergent, socially anxious, or struggle to navigate social dynamics, those signals are not as easily decipherable. They move through every conversation without the feedback loop that everyone else takes for granted.

Throughout the project, we kept coming back to one question: what if you could finally visualize what you've been missing? Not as a crutch, but as a coach. Not surveillance, but self-knowledge. Our solution to that question became Cue.

What It Does

Cue is a smart glasses companion app that helps neurodivergent users and people with social anxiety read and respond to social cues in real time. Users set up a personal profile with information including their interests, energy level, and the mood they want to project. Users are given full autonomy over how they show up before they ever walk into a room.

When they arrive at an event, they activate a scan through their glasses. The lens overlay surfaces live behavioral signals such as body language, emotional temperature, eye contact, and engagement level.

Every session is saved to a personal journal for later reflection. No personal information about others is collected or retained. Over time, Cue's Coach tab builds a personalized skill development path. Users are able to track activities, receive real-time tips from the Cue assistant, and gradually develop a genuine fluency in social dynamics.

How We Built It

We approached Cue as a speculative design challenge rooted in a real human need. Our process moved through four stages:

1. Problem definition — We did initial research on neurodivergence, social anxiety, and social perception. We defined a clear target audience and mapped their specific friction points in social environments.

2. System design — We mapped the full product ecosystem: the companion app, the AR lens layer, and the coaching model. Every feature was stress-tested against our core principle: this tool should make people feel more capable, never more surveilled.

3. UX and visual design — We designed the full mobile app in Figma Make, building a user flow covering the user profile, visibility filters, coaching tools. The design system prioritizes low cognitive load through the use of neutral colors and plain-language copy.

Challenges We Ran Into

The hardest design challenge was consent. Building a tool that observes human behavior in real time carries serious ethical weight. We spent significant time working through how to make passive sensing transparent to bystanders, how to prevent misuse in power-imbalanced contexts, and how to ensure that the people being observed retain privacy even when they haven't opted in.

We also wrestled with information density on the AR display. The users who need Cue most are often the ones most vulnerable to sensory and cognitive overload. Every element of the lens overlay had to be intentional and the default had to be less, not more.

Finally, framing the coaching experience without it feeling clinical or punishing required constant iteration. Words like "score," "fail," and "incorrect" were cut entirely. The language had to feel like a trusted friend, not a performance review.

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

Designing a consent architecture that centers the privacy of everyone in the interaction, not just the Cue user Building an AR overlay concept that surfaces complex behavioral data through a calm, minimal visual language that doesn't overwhelm users Creating a coaching model that reframes struggle as data. We wanted to translate every difficult interaction into material for growth rather than evidence of inadequacy

What We Learned

Designing for vulnerable users demands a different standard of care. Every default setting, every piece of micro-copy, every moment of friction in the onboarding flow carries more weight when your user is someone who already finds the world harder to navigate. We learned to design the safeguards first, not last.

We also learned that speculative design is most powerful when it's honest about its risks. The most interesting conversations we had weren't about what Cue could do, but about where it could go wrong.

What's Next for Cue

Lens hardware integration: partnering with AR eyewear manufacturers to build a native Cue overlay SDK, moving the concept from speculative to deployable

Clinical validation: working with occupational therapists and social skills researchers to validate the coaching model and ensure it produces genuine long-term skill development

Community features: a consensual, opt-in network where Cue users can share anonymous insights about which social contexts feel most accessible, helping each other find lower-anxiety entry points into social life

Expanded sensing: incorporating vocal tone, conversational pacing, and ambient sound signals to give users a richer, more complete picture of each interaction

Ultimately, the goal is a version of Cue that makes itself unnecessary, where the skills users build with it become so internalized that they no longer need the product to read the room.