Family Jar
FamilyJar is a safe cloud environment where each family member chooses when and what digital content they share - such as a favourite song, an interesting news article or a photo from an amazing meal out. Powered by machine learning, FamilyJar encourages the sharing of relevant and engaging content amongst family members, resulting in a curated “Family Feed”.
Scope
Problem framing
Concept development
Validation
Client
Telefonica
(Public health-
social alienation)
Duration
Sep. - Dec.,2018
My Role
User research
User experience
Ideation
Branding design
UX flow
UI Design
Award
Selected project
WHAT'S THE CONTEXT?
This project was initiated by a design agency in Spain called Telefonica. One of the topics that they wanted us to investigate was how loneliness is affecting people's lives and how we can intervene with tangible solutions. We found out young people feel lonely more often than other age groups. They are more digitally connected than ever before, but potentially at the expense of their inter-family relationships.
CHALLENGE
To design a digital service that connects family members and bridges a generation gap, and investigate how to build and nurture inter-family relationships as a way to build overall mental health resilience.
AIMS
• To build digital relationships between parents and children.
• To create digital memories of family members on the cloud based mobile platform.
OUTCOME
Interviewing over 10 people across European countries, 90% of people said they would like to use a family jar in their family. They saw the value of how this service helped them build empathy and improve the relationship between family members.
Our client,Telefonica, invited our team from 25 teams to Barcelona, Spain to pitch our ideas to their key stakeholders. They found this idea has potential.
WHY IS THE PROBLEM?
Loneliness is a thread for mental health among young people
In the U.K. 40% of years of 16-24 often feel very lonely, they experience loneliness more often and more intensely than any other age group. Around 55,000 people took part in the survey, making it the largest of its kind in the world. - BBC
Loneliness is not simply the result of someone’s personality or character; it’s vital to acknowledge contributors to loneliness such as health and economic status.
Loneliness is the negative emotions that accompany a discrepancy between one’s desired and achieved levels of social relations.
Youth workers report that young people don’t generally actively seek help for loneliness, either through not identifying it themselves or not wanting to admit it.
WHAT CAUSES "LONELINESS" AMONG YOUNG PEOPLE?
We identified 8 variables that affect teenagers becoming lonely and synthesised it to 4 key factors. Then we reframed the research questions: how might we build resilience among teenagers who are at risk of becoming lonely?
INVESTIGATING EACH KEY VARIABLE
We investigated more details in each variable in order to gain more concrete examples of loneliness.
INVESTIGATED TEENGAERS' SOCIAL CIRCLE
Based on key variables that included meaningful relationships, self-awareness, and social expectation, we started interviewing over 5 teenagers and 2 experts - 1 psychologist and 1 social worker, to better understand and learn about teens' digital attitudes at school and at home.
DEFINED THE CRITICAL MOMENT
Building a life cycle for parents and children is a way to see when parents will allow their kids to use digital devices. The key moment is how we want to intervene and prevent it before it becomes a problem.
TARGET AUDIENCES
PERSONA
USER INSIGHTS
INSIGHTS
The generation gap between parents and children
01/
Lack of empathy
Empathy between family members directly influences the development of meaningful relationships
02/
Emotional connection
It is important for parents to recognize their children's behavior and emotion. Parents need to find a way to connect with their kids.
03/
Meaningful relationship
Teenagers' close relationships will affect how they think and behave.
04/
Individual's resilience
The best interactions are those based on the recognition of emotions and not on the devaluation of emotions.
OPPORTUNITY
How might we connect family members and support
them to build healthy digital relationships and reduce the risk of loneliness among teens?
THE SOLUTION
Family Jar aims to support the agency of all users, encourage a healthy digital privacy, and nurture positive interfamily relationships. Relevant now and into the future, continued use throughout a family’s life allows for an evolving and ever-changing service experience.
As each FamilyJar fills up, the relevance and intelligence of our suggestions and advice will improve, reflecting the sharing needs of the family members as they mature. As families rely more and more on digital services for entertainment, information and capturing memories, we see FamilyJar as the essential companion in this changing landscape to support inter-family relationships.
HOW DOES THIS SYSTEM WORK?
USE CASES
Created a family playlist and shared their preference and emotion with each other.
USE CASES
Shared memories among family members.
THEORY OF CHANGE
Built prevention for loneliness from early-stage.
DESIGN PRINCIPLES
The principles for the concept
Safe social network
Create a safe social network for families, an intelligent and dynamic cloud sharing environment that gives families the freedom to stay connected.
Optimising digital literacy
Share digital language amongst families and build the empathy to support each other.
Establishing healthy privacy
Create healthy digital relationships across family members and learn how to respect their privacy.
Developing good digital behaviours
Consolidate a digital and real connection. Create memorable moments in their lives.
PROTOTYPE SESSION
Understand the behaviour patterns in how teenager use their smartphones.
Result:
Teens are more likely to share some digital contents with their parents if their parents won't judge their life or behaviours.
Identify preferable
and shareable contents between family members.
Result:
The common topics people like to share with their family are music, movies, photos, news, calendars and locations.
Testing our MVP digital service and getting feedback from user experience.
Result:
Most of the participants liked this concept, and they were able to explore features on the live demo.
FINAL THOUGHTS & TAKEAWAYS
Pitching idea to Telefonica
This was a great chance to receive feedback from the design agency and see how we could make a solution with business sense. I learned how to identify who is responsible for this service and how to grow this product sustainably.
Research insight analysis
This topic is relevant to everyone, and we reflected on our relationship with our family members by sharing what communication gap there was when we were teenagers. We all agreed that this is a complex problem that needs a tool or service to support teenagers' adolescent life.
TEAM
2 User research
2 Product designer (UI UX)
1 Product manager
Irene Liao
Beatrice Mandelstam
Emilia D'Orazio
Hyojin Bae
Yushun Zhai