Prototype link: Prototype link (Please submit a link to a playable prototype, not a link to your design file) Prototype Link A link to your team’s prototype, whether that’s Framer, Figma or another design tool. The playable prototype must include at least 6 hi-fidelity screens.
A video demo with a maximum of 3 minutes: Please prioritize walking through the app you designed, explaining key features – information about your research and design process should be included in the free response answers
Responses to questions about the user research and design thinking process Describe your project (Max 150 words)
The common sentiment between children and parents is that it’s hard to address vulnerable topics because of a lack of understanding. Fruit for Thought bridges the generational gap between young adults and their parents by creating an outlet for communication and emotional vulnerability. By answering a question of the day, a child and their parent acquire a “streak”. Every week their streak lasts, they unlock new badges, represented by different fruits. As the users’ streak progresses, the questions dig deeper into effective modes of communicating and being emotionally vulnerable with one another. This solution creates a low-pressure space for small conversational exchanges that build emotional closeness over time. This application hopes to introduce parents to a healthier form of communication with their children, while reminding both parties that there is always love for each other in the family.
Describe your research process and findings. If you conducted any surveys or interviews, please include the survey form and/or interview questions here. If you conducted secondary research by pulling from online sources, please include a link to your sources. (Max 500 words) Survey Responses
When our team heard the phrase “generational gap”, our first step was to identify what it personally meant to us. As we deliberated, we found that we resonated with the generational gap between parents and their children. This helped us identify our stakeholders of young adults from the ages of 18-24 and their parents. In order to gain a better understanding of our own problem statement, we created a survey that sought to record the demographics, parental closeness, and the areas in which our interviewees felt connected or disconnected with their parents. By investigating these topics, we hoped to uncover what specific areas caused them to feel connected or disconnected with their parents.
In our interviews, we recorded 18 responses from young adults between the ages of 19 and 24. A large majority, at 11/18 interviewees, were 19 years old. 10/18 of our interviewees were first-generation immigrants. When asked to rate the closeness of their relationships with their parents on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being no relationship and 5 being an extremely close relationship, 12/18 of our interviewees gave a score of 4 or 5. The average score for this question was 3.72. These results slowly began to shape our problem statement. How can we improve the 3.72 average closeness score to an ideal score of 5? This is where our other questions provided valuable insights. 10/18 interviewees stated that they had a positive connection with their parents through cultural similarities and quality time. A consistent sentiment among interviewees highlighted quality time as their main way of connecting with their parents. In-person interactions appeared to drive closeness and feelings of connectedness more than any other form of connection. However, 10/18 and 11/18 responses included that communication and emotional vulnerability were major points of friction and the source of disconnection, respectively. Their reasoning showed feelings of frustration or sadness about the emotional disconnect between their parents and themselves. Many responses referenced an age and generational gap that appeared to create different communication styles and levels of emotional vulnerability, such as one interviewee saying with one interviewee even saying, “it’s hard to speak about serious and vulnerable topics with them due to their lack of understanding or just a cultural difference in how they were raised”. This sentiment began to bleed into the ways that our interviewees wanted to have a closer connection with their parents. 11/18 response mentioned some form of communication or emotional vulnerability, while only 3/18 sought deeper cultural connections, and 3/18 wanted more quality time. Our data conveyed that that young adults’ pain points may include a lack of communication and emotional transparency from their parents. They seem to have a need for better understanding and connection with their parents. After analyzing our responses, we identified our problem statement: How can we bridge the generational gap between children and their parents to foster a greater sense of connection through communication and emotional vulnerability?
Describe your most important design decisions. What research findings and/or user testing results led you to make these decisions? (Max 500 words)
While asking our interviewees about their parents' communication styles, it was brought up that parents weren’t the best at verbally expressing themselves. Instead, they often showed love through small, quiet actions. One interviewee in particular said, “Asian parents express love differently than Westerners”. In Asian culture, the most defining way parents showed nonverbal affection was to cut fruit for their children. There were no verbal apologies after a bickering session, but there would always be a plate of fruits in front of you with a small “here, eat”. This symbolic gesture of communication and apologies inspired us to center the concept of our design around fruits. In order to bridge the generational gap between children and their parents, we chose to design a feature that encourages users to communicate. Since our interviewees pointed out a lack of communication between themselves and their parents, we wanted to facilitate a way for healthier self-expression to be built in a low-pressure environment. This inspired our main feature, “Question of the Day”. This feature is a thought-provoking question provided by us, which takes away the need for the users to try to start a conversation themselves and eases them into becoming productive communicators. After submitting their answer to “Question of the Day” during their own available times, the user waits for the other’s response. Once they reply, the user receives a notification and can read the response thoughtfully. Simply viewing the response counts toward maintaining their streak. The streak automatically appears after viewing, updating the streak count to give instantaneous feedback on their progress and engagement. This design encourages consistent participation without pressure, helping families build closer connections through regular, low-stakes conversations. This addresses our interviewees’ desire for more emotional vulnerability, while still taking into account that this is something that is built over time, not overnight. Additionally, the incentive of collecting more streak badges may help users be more motivated to complete their daily question everyday. In order to track the steady progress they’ve made in communicating over their time of using the application, we included a “Previous Questions” log. This allows the user to view previous questions and responses from both parties. One of our interviewees mentioned that they would like to, “start shifting conversations more positively and making more happy memories”, so we thought including a recollection of past conversations would be a great medium for this. By having a reminder of how both the children and parents improve, we hope that it helps them see how they have worked together in the past to get where they are now. With every design choice we made, we took into consideration how they would benefit the user. Both our visual and UI/UX design were made to facilitate a welcoming environment for children and parents to be more vulnerable with one another, as well as use the application with ease.
If applicable, describe how you utilized AI in your design process in detail. Please explain where AI fit into your workflow, which tools you used, and the specific purpose AI served at that stage. Include a concrete example of how AI influenced a design decision. (Max 500 words)
In our design process, we utilized ChatGPT to streamline the ideation process. With a limited time constraint, we wanted to focus on the iterative process and reduce the labor required to brainstorm the smaller steps. The biggest use of AI was in the questions we were designing for our app. With hundreds of potential questions, we asked ChatGPT to help us come up with questions that would fit the criteria of emotional vulnerability, communication, and general everyday conversational topics. This allowed us to consider potential questions and the importance of certain rhetorical choices in the wording of our questions. Considering the emotions that we may invoke with certain questions, it was important to consider the emotional impacts some questions may have.
Built With
- figma
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