Project Overview

Software

Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Rhinoceros (product modeling and rendering)

Duration

3 weeks

Methods

UX research, Ambient Device, Extreme Persona

Bonnie Jiang | UX Research and Watch Design

Yiyi Gao | UX Research and Screen Design

COSMO is a wearable ambient device that improve family communication through generations by allowing for non-texting and immediate response. The device can also generate a random year that prompt the user to engage in new topics during their communications, instead of repeating their daily routine. The years generated are represented by constellations on the watch, and users can add stories to the year archives to store their shared memories. 

Background

Generation gaps, especially in between the elderly and the younger generations cause family members to grow apart.

Design challenge - Design an ambient device to improve communications in the family across generations, in the case of extreme personas.

Ambient device aims to minimize mental effort by using per-attentive processing to display information. By using extreme personas in the user experience research process, we will be able to address more specific details compare to a generalized persona. If we are able to conquer the extreme needs, we are more likely to satisfy the common population.

Research & Synthesis

Problem Identification

By using elderly people who suffered from health problems and grandchildren who are in their early 20s and away from home as examples, we want to understand the problems between the family’s communications across generations, including the inconvenience of texting for elderly people, schedule conflicts, and repeated routinely communications. 

Primary Research

We conducted interviews with participants in the demographics, including college students and senior users.

Quotes from the Interviews

From younger generation

• “When you get busy with you friends, you don’t normally call them. They always say that okay it is fine.”

• “Never told them bad news, school is doing well everything is fine. Hide the truth a little bit.“

• “Out of courtesy or I feel bad because I have not call him for a long time.“

From elder generations

• “I barely uses Facebook, twitter, it’s stupid, but I probably uses more technology than you do.”

• “Technology is not useful unless you know how to use it”

• “Why do we hide the truth? We want to make things more convenient. What do we hide? How deep do we want to go?“

Secondary Research

One of the interviewees had a recent stroke. We learned from them that health issue makes the communication even harder for the elderly.

A stroke can affect the way your body functions

• Problems with movement and balance

• Excessive tiredness

• Problems with communication: many people have difficulty with speech and language after their stroke. 

• Problems with memory and thinking

• Changes to your emotions: a stroke has an emotional impact, which can lead to problems like depression and anxiety. It can also make it more difficult to control your emotions.

Based on the primary and secondary research, we built two extreme personas.

Extreme Personas

Scenarios

Scenario 1

Keyword: 

People don’t know if their calls may disturb the other person. 

Quick response through non texting method

One night, Joey is sitting in the library and decided to study for his exam. In ten minutes, he will meet with some classmates for a group project. However, Dave called him. Joey didn’t want to answer the video call because he was busy. At the same time, he felt bad for just hanging off Dave’s call.

By pressing the “Hello/Busy” button on the watch twice, Joey can notify Dave that he was busy at the moment and can’t answer his call. On Dave’s watch, the sign for “Busy” vibrants for one second and lights up with a BUSY sign and Joey’s image. 

Scenario 2

Keyword: find more interesting topics  

Often when Joey calls Dave, he doesn’t want to talk about school nor does he want to hear long lessons from Dave about school and life. However, he found that they had nothing else to talk about. He already knew everything about Dave’s routinely retired life.

The watch, from time to time, shows a random year between their birthday and the current date. One day, the year “1968” pops up on both of their digital screens. Joey doesn’t know anything about 1968, and in his next call, he asked Dave about it. Dave first didn’t recall anything, but after a while he remembered. To Joey surprise, Dave said that he went to Papua New Guinea with a group of professor for a large field study project on the settlements of polynesians around the late 1960s, and their findings were published as a book. What's More, Dave told Joey that he got drunk and lost his passport, and it was a long story to return home. Joey never knew about this trip of Dave, and Dave seemed to be a very different person than his didactic grandpa.

Final Digital Interface