HearU

Human-Centered Design and Design Research

Timeline: January 2020 - May 2020

Team: Nick Wagener and Candy Win

Role: Design Researcher and Service Designer

A special thanks to: Abby Fifer Mandell, for introducing me to the wonderful world of human-centered design.

One of my most memorable college experiences was participating in USC’s Social Innovation Design Lab, which introduced me to design thinking and how it can be applied to innovation and entrepreneurship. The entire experience is centered around creating interdisciplinary solutions to challenges faced by under-resourced communities and developing creative and accessible services.

For the lab, we worked specifically with the older adult population to identify problems, ideate solutions, and bring these products to life. After repeated cycles of empathetic research, problem definitions, and rapid prototyping, my team and I discovered a disconnect in relationship maintenance between grandparents and their grandchildren. This led us to develop HearU, a mobile application and virtual communication platform for initiating consistent and meaningful conversations.

Pre-Field Research

Prior to going out to conduct field research, we each developed method cards to strategically plan our approach toward gathering quantitative and qualitative data through our conversations. This included creating guides to understand our population’s struggles and challenges, dreams and aspirations, economic conditions, and social networks. In the end, I came up with four method cards that included sparking conversations surrounding daily routines, picture sharing, resource flows, and friends and families.

30 Meaningful Conversations

After creating our method cards, my team and I visited senior centers, museums, and community gatherings all around Los Angeles to speak with older adults of all backgrounds. Each of us was tasked with completing 30 in-depth, meaningful conversations with our participants to better understand some of the daily struggles that they currently face, leading to over 50 hours of insightful data and ethnographic research.

Defining the Problem & Opportunity

Conducting field research allowed my team and me to understand so many of the emotional and physical challenges that the older adult population faces. However, one specific problem stood out:

Grandparents struggle to maintain communication with relatives.

Older adults who live alone and with family still around experience frustration from limited communication with their kids and grandchildren. This results in them not only feeling lonely, but irrelevant as well. Younger people fail to spend enough time with older adults due to situational factors like a lack of relatability or fear of judgment and boredom when spending time with each other.

In addition, when speaking with grandparents who had picture-perfect relationships and conversations, they all mentioned their habit and ability to ask structured, unique, and engaging questions that initiate insightful responses and genuine moments. In fact, one of our grandparents we talked to, Doreen, mentioned:

“I am intentional about the questions I ask them.”

This intricate intentionality that combines both a desire for connection and an understanding in mutual exchange is what fosters interest on both sides of the relationship.

How Might We?

After multiple rounds of defining and analyzing the problem and opportunity, my team and I formed “How Might We” statements that allowed us to pair specific problems with common assets that are abundant in the lives of older adults. This allowed us to develop our final HMW statement:

How might we use structured questions to foster more meaningful and consistent communication between grandparents and their grandchildren?

Design Ideation & Prototyping

After developing our “How Might We” statements, we used mind mapping to generate as many ideas as possible. This allowed us to spark a series of potential ideas for our prototyping phase.

For our low-fidelity prototype, we create a stuffed animal walkie talkie that allows grandparents and grandchildren to consistently communicate with each other and potentially store recordings like a time capsule.

I quickly developed simple mockups that allowed us to convey our ideas and presented it to designers, consultants and experts in aging for design critique and feedback. My team also created an attractive environment that communicates the context in which the product will be used in the community using drawings, pictures and in-house materials.

After some great insights and feedback on our product, I realized that we needed to develop a more engaging device for grandparents to use.

Field Testing and Customer Logs

Now, it was time to take the product back to our target population to see how we could change and iterate our product. My team and I collectively (and virtually) reached out to 30 grandparents who were willing to share insights on their relationship with their grandchildren. By observing their behavior, reactions, and comments to our questions and product, I realized that a sizable proportion of grandparents struggled to maintain a significant and strong relationship with their own grandchildren. I also discovered that some of the communication barriers in these relationships are due to:

1. Distance. Many grandchildren are physically located at opposite ends of the United States away from grandparents, some even in different countries.

2. Scheduling conflicts. With hectic lifestyles, time zones, and day-to-day tasks, having a set time dedicated to a phone call proves to be surprisingly hard.

3. Fear of a 5-minute conversation turning into a 30-minute conversation. For some grandchildren and grandchildren, there is a fear and annoyance that these quick updates in life can turn into much longer (and inconvenient) conversations.

4. Flat conversations where people don’t know what to talk about. Finding that middle ground between two generations can sometimes be difficult, resulting in confusing and unfulfilling conversations.

5. Lack of accountability. Promises can be hard to keep, and procrastination is a common habit that sneaks into everybody’s lives.

These insights allowed us to shift the purpose of our product to strengthen the relationships and communication between grandparents and their grandchildren by making conversations more meaningful, engaging, and consistent.

Back during our rapid prototyping phase, I developed both the HearU Bear and HearU Remote, believing that most grandparents are not technologically capable of effectively using mobile applications for communication support. However, after going out into the field again and speaking with more and more grandparents, I realized that 95% of potential customers preferred effective communication through their own mobile devices. So, using both the useful value of intentionality and meaningful questions with mobile device usage, I prototyped our human-centered solution: the HearU app.

Finalizing the Product

HearU is a virtual communication platform and mobile application that utilizes rhythmic reminders, asynchronous scheduling, and layered questions to normalize and easily initiate meaningful conversations between grandparents and their grandchildren through voice messaging mediums.

HearU is specifically designed for grandparents and their grandchildren, but due to the universal relatability of the core problem, anybody can use the product. It is designed to overcome both physical distance and conversation barriers because of its digital and technological capabilities.

Because of the asynchronous communication capabilities of HearU, both grandparents and grandchildren do not have to be online at the same time to communicate. This allows the grandparents and grandchildren to use the application at a time that is most optimal for them, therefore alleviating the pressure of having to respond to or answer calls when either of them is busy.

Furthermore, HearU’s conversation starters can help spark topics of discussion so that both grandparents and grandchildren can purely focus on the content and responses.

View the HearU wireframes and mockups here.

Key Takeaways

This was my first exposure to the world of human-centered design, and words cannot express how life-changing this experience was. By the end of this project, I learned how to:

1. Fill in the gaps of my own awareness. I can’t just assume that my product is going to work based on my own notions and ideas of certain communities. I need to get into the field and actually speak with those I am trying to solve a problem for.

2. Uncover the story underneath the story. It takes patience and kindness to understand what my user is going through. By asking intentional questions about our lives, I can uncover ideas and feelings that were never expressed before.

3. Share the good news. Separate from this project, my team and I always started lab sessions by sharing the good news about our lives. It was something that was so different from any course I’ve ever taken, but it taught me how to be grateful and appreciate everything I have.