Kin, a mobile family app that brings parents and students emotionally closer, through new and exciting ways to bond and connect with each other

Nicole Fermie
Jul 27, 2017 · 18 min read

Role: UX Researcher, Product Designer

Timeframe: 4 weeks

Project Type: Conceptual Product Design

Tools: Sketch and Axure RP

Deliverables: Competitive Analysis, Marketing Matrices, Personas, Customer Journey Maps, Paper Prototypes, Axure Prototypes, Annotated Axure Wireframes for Developers, UX and UI designers, Future Considerations, Product Roadmap

The Brief

In an effort to build relationships, instil trust, and foster communication between students and their parents or guardians in all communities, the National PTA has hired your team to design a digital product that helps parents participate effectively in their children’s academic lives.

Project Information:

Our primary goal for this project was to design a product that understands the changing needs, wants and frustrations experienced by both parents and 14–18 year old students and to close the widening disconnect that our research identified between them. This foray into product design was incredibly challenging on multiple levels.

Our Approach

We conducted an in–depth competitive analysis to ascertain whether any other companies were operating in the realm of connecting parents with their students. We found that many student–parent interactions took place during extracurricular activities. We also found evidence for a palpable emotional disconnect as teenage students begin to desire autonomy from their parents, often at the expense of academic performance. We created design principles by synthesising our interview and competitive analysis data to create a product that endeavoured to practise four vital aspects that would help improve the relationship between parents and students:

Our Solution

Our solution addressed a palpable emotional disconnect that became apparent after interviewing students, parents and teachers. This disconnect was often plagued by a lack of time and motivation on behalf of both parents and students to interact with each other. We created Kin:

The moodcard concept that ultimately resounded the most with the students and parents we usability tested with.

Of course there’s more to this project — but before you commit…


‘Parental involvement affected the student’s academic achievement, sense of well being, attitude, preparedness, and life aspirations’

Conversely, other articles revealed how parental absence could occasionally be beneficial, particularly with regard to homework. Other surprising findings showed that too much parental involvement can result in diminishing returns in a child’s academic success. These studies called for a need for balancing levels of involvement and how leaving room for autonomy in teenagers can lead to success.

The apparent challenge was going to be balancing an emotional disconnect between parents and students in the light of the growing need for autonomy among children.

I realised that the only way we were going to achieve alignment within our team would be through a good old-fashioned card sort in order to find the most promising insights to pursue from our literature review. We narrowed our scope to include these trending aspects of parental involvement that positively affect academic performance in students:

A lack of particularly recent research on parental involvement and its effect on education also made this project the perfect candidate for UX research, as the only way to truthfully understand the relationship between parents and students was through user interviews.

We went truly wide when looking into indirect competitors by incorporating companies like Snapchat or Fitbit which provided us with inventive examples of ‘progressive feedback’. However, a worrying question began to form in my mind: if parental involvement really was a palpable element that affected a child’s academic performance, why weren’t there more products directly catering to improving or sustaining it?

Other worries included whether parents were going to be receptive to a tool that tapped into such personal elements of their lives. We decided to go just a tiny step further to alleviate those worries by conducting SWOT analyses of our key competitors. What better way to figure out what was missing than by finding trends in the opportunities that competitors were not taking advantage of?

An example of the insights gained from conducting SWOT analyses on competitors, seen here for the company Reading Rockets

We found that many of these competitors didn’t provide any elements of gamification (see SWOT analysis above). Others displayed feature bloat as they attempted to cater to too many users such as students, parents and teachers alike such as Schoolrunner and Seesaw.

We collated these SWOT analyses findings into marketing matrices. These were incredibly helpful in eliminating certain avenues we might’ve pursued in our product development. For example, we decided not to create a product that physically tracked academic performance through grades, because there were almost too many competitors to include on one matrix.

We put the primary users of parents, teachers and students on the y-axis. We placed ‘gamification’ on the x-axis for this matrix. We also found a distinct lack of competitors who aimed to deliver just one compelling feature to their target users. We therefore created a second matrix that measured the number of features that catered to either parents, students or both.

Our hypotheses were confirmed. There was a distinct lack of companies providing elements of gamification within their products that were aimed solely at parents and students, or families (ie. excluded teachers).

Zeroing in on our objectives using research assumptions

We wanted the users themselves to either validate (or disprove) whether:

Our users articulated the following key insights which helped us focus on the barriers to interaction between both students and their parents:

We created Evan.

We also created Jane.

These personas provided us with a place to capture the physical and emotional needs, wants, goals and frustrations that we would be designing for. We created a series of design guidelines based off our personas to summarise the key issues that we wanted to solve, ahead of our concepting phase.

These guidelines helped us to address the greatest needs, frustrations and goals in order to create a single product that spoke to both of these very distinct user types. Our insights throughout our research phase spoke to a disconnect between our users, we wanted our designs to address through improving the levels of visibility into each other’s lives. We also wanted rise to the glaring challenge of having a huge generational gap by creating a product that was inclusive and exciting to both students and their parents. We strove to ensure that all designs allowed the users to be expressive despite their frustrations and limitations such as time restrictions. Lastly, we wanted ensure that both user types had control and felt empowered over the levels of information they shared with each other in order to allow for the need for autonomy in students. We rounded out our research phase by creating a succinct problem statement that summarised all of our initial user research:

We were finally ready to begin ideating, armed with a solid set of design guidelines and a tangible problem to solve.


The levels of involvement between both Evan and Jane are visually displayed as a colour gradient from red to green. Accompanying emojis helped us to visualise the exact pain points experienced in an average week in both Evan and Jane’s lives. These two pieces worked extremely well in focusing my team on the specific instances when our target audience were struggling to be involved in each other’s lives due to happenings that could have been alleviated or tempered using technology.

I felt drawn towards creating a concept that allowed parents and students to find activities that they both enjoyed in an attempt to reduce their emotional disconnect, thereby fusing the extracurricular aspect into my solution. I toyed with various concepts that made the process of finding shared activities engaging and enjoyable by borrowing microinteractions from Tinder and even infinite event browsing from apps like the event finder Dice. The users would then have the ability to book-in time to engage in this ‘matched’ event using an integrated calendar. It was simple, but I hoped its simplicity would suffice in bridging the emotional and generational gap.

  1. an emotional status tracker, because it provided a talking point between users
  2. a shared events/family activities picker, because it enabled both parties to interact and find a common event to look forward to
  3. a family locator, because parents were often concerned about the whereabouts of students
  4. a family chat, which allowed for instantaneous messaging exclusively between family members, cutting through the noise of other messaging apps
  5. a family calendar, for busy parents and their children to book time in with each other
  6. a rewards/point system, (iterated to seem less transactional) — to make students feel more motivated to continue using the app and engage with their parents

To summarize our usability tests, our users unanimously valued having a family calendar feature:

“I see this as useful especially if you can share not just shared activities, but appointments.” Greg, 49

My concept — matching both users with a Tinder-style swipe interaction — was also successful.

“I think it’s pretty straightforward, easy to use, I can see how if some parents have long commutes, if you’re not able to have a conversation, to be able to use this as a straightforward way to find common ground and things that you can look forward to when spending time together.” Greg, 49

Other concepts that tested well were having an in-house chat feature and location finder. Parents and students both found value in being able to keep track of each other particularly during after school periods.

I suggested he look into one of my favourite mental health apps, Moodnotes for inspiration. We didn’t quite have enough time to test any more participants with a paper prototype iteration of this idea so we decided to take his concept straight into Axure.

Creating divergent prototypes

We had four divergent prototypes in the making that needed to be fleshed out.

Crib (my concept, event finder) was a mobile app that brought parents and their students emotionally closer together by helping them find events they both enjoyed. These events provided incentives to engage with each other within the app. The app focused on helping parents get over the feeling of not having anything in common with their children. The most relevant design principle that I kept returning to when designing this particular concept was empowering. This was because finding a shared activity required both parties to independently match. This meant Evan and Jane were both being empowered to make choices of their own.

Fam was a mobile app that tracked the emotional relationship of parents and students through the engagement in motivational, practical, and creative activities. Fam’s primary value proposition was in finding ways to incite engagement between Evan, the student who was veering more towards autonomy and technology, and his time-pressed parents who wanted to engage more with him. The design principles that guided its creation were making sure that the app was expressive and inclusive. The intention was to allow both parties to express their emotions quickly, meaningfully and on the go. The app encouraged inclusivity as it provided value to both users despite the generational gap between them through the simple use of emojis to communicate with each other.

Crib (rewards) was an app that encourages middle schoolers to create shared events with their parents in a family calendar that included a rewards/points systems to incite continual use. This incarnation of Crib addressed the feelings of estrangement and desire for autonomy in our student persona. Crib used an incentive-based premise to attract students into interacting with their parents more. It was built to be inclusive by drawing students and parents together using rewards for students, therefore externalizing and bridging the generational gap.

Home Hub (snapchat-style feed and family locator) is a mobile application that encouraged our users to connect and share day to day activities and feelings with the family. Home Hub addressed the divide between our personas by providing them with more engaging tools to communicate with, such as a visual snap-chat style video carousel. It also included a location option that could be toggled on and off so members of a family could locate each other. Home hub was built to be inclusive by once again bridging the generational gap and providing users with a family-exclusive communication experience. This concept was also built to be visible as it allowed users to find each other at any time and share their experiences instantaneously and exclusively with the family. There were elements of empowerment within this concept as well as the ‘location finder’ feature allowed users, particularly the students, to toggle their location, thus lending them an air of autonomy.

We knew that Axure would offer us the ability to prototype just the right amount of micro–interactions into our MVP to engage and convey the playfulness of our future app. I wanted to create elements of delight throughout the event selection process as our competitive analysis showed huge gaps in the market for a tool with elements of gamification. This stage in the project was a great time to test whether this was a gap to take advantage of.

User Testing Feedback:

Our usability test feedback, collated above, concluded that both parties enjoyed being able to finally find common ground in activities and express themselves through the emoji dashboard. Users perceived the emoji dashboard as cute, simple and enjoyable. The rewards system was not received well at all by parents as they felt that this infringed on their parenting style.

The two concepts of finding mutual events/activities and the emoji dashboard tested neck-and-neck. In hindsight, I would’ve loved to have tested with a lot more parents but time was not on our side. We synthesised all the data and realised that it was the students that we really needed to engage the most. The balance had suddenly tipped, and we found that parents needed next to no additional motivation to engage more in their kids’ lives. In keeping with the persona that we developed, the parents spoke mostly to their lack of time, which explained their unanimous love for a calendar feature. Kids, however, especially between 13–15, needed far more motivation to engage. Luckily, the micro-interactive and playful emoji dashboard provided just enough delight to engage the students we tested.

The emoji dashboard provided an emotional springboard for disconnected students and parents.

We combined the emoji dashboard concept with the shared activities finder and calendar. This was in part due to many students naturally associating their functionalities with each other. Meena, a 14 year old, summarised this finding well when she said:

“..if I had this app and my mom was sad I could say ‘hey mom what’s wrong’ with an emoji. And then I could make plans at TGI Fridays, Subway or McDonalds to cheer her up.” [sic] Meena, 14

An in-action example of how our persona would be able to react to her son’s display of frustration or sadness through the emoji moodcard concept.

We decided that our concept findings were gearing us towards creating a family mobile app where parents and students posted their feelings as emojis and reacted to those feelings with shared activities. And thus, Kin was born: an app that brings parents and their students emotionally closer, through new and exciting ways to bond and connect with each other.

Oh — and of course: Meet Kin!

You can click through the student flow for our prototype of Kin, here to get a feel for the prototype and our attempts at solving the solutions identified at the outset of our research project.

We had an incredible opportunity at the end of this project to present our final product to a panel of Chicago-based design professionals. They were excited by the eureka of complex solutions being dashed in favour of the emoji moodcards. Their critique and follow-up questions were mostly centered around our journey to create our user composites, but not about the concept itself, which spoke to the fact that we had managed to successfully communicate Kin’s value to our design audience.

It would’ve been great to conduct further tests to find out about what other small interactions the students we tested could have found long-term value and delight in. Also, Axure’s capabilities were stretched to the rafters in our attempt to build in clever microinteractions. Further prototypes might’ve benefitted from having parts of them built using either Proto.io or Principle.

My greatest successes within this project were marked by moments in the concepting phase. Watching kids play with mere paper prototypes and communicate the value proposition of your product back to you, affirmed my faith in UX as being a discipline that sets products up for success by addressing needs, wants and goals ahead of mere aesthetics.

If the product cannot be used by its target users, then no hex code in the world can save it.


Click on the image below to read about my how I created a mobile web-based platform for delivering restaurant meals to cancer patients and their caregivers on chemotherapy treatment days

Or click on the image below to view another project that took me on an exciting exploration into the world of travel planning for the creators of a site called Tripidee.

nicolefermie

the same thing we do every night Pinky, design to take over the world.

Nicole Fermie

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Playful human in training

nicolefermie

the same thing we do every night Pinky, design to take over the world.

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