Feelings Chopsticks
Say No to Family Feud
Feelings Chopsticks
Role
UX researcher
UX Designer
Team
Wenxin Wang, Adhiraj Gorule, Shirley Zhang, Vaishali Vashisht
Duration
8 weeks
UW HCDE 518 Project
Skills
Wireframing, prototyping, Survey, Semi-structured Interview, Persona, Storyboard, User Flows, Information Architecture, Affinity Mapping, Usability Testing
Problem Context
Many Asian Americans face unique struggles when trying to communicate and maintain a healthy relationship with their parents. These conflicts are linked to increased levels of anxiety and depression for both parents and children. According to the 2020 Census, Asians are also the fastest growing population in the states, with 57% being foreign-born. With these rapidly changing demographics and increased number of bicultural families, there is a large need to further understand and address these unique challenges. Specifically, this project’s scope evolved through the design process to focus on mitigating impact of acculturation gap on parent-child relationship by leveraging story sharing.
Target Users
Second-generation Chinese Americans between ages 18-25 and their first-generation immigrant parents.
Design Question
How can we strengthen the parent-child relationship in Chinese American families?
Design Process
I. Understand
01. Literature Review
What challenges are uniquely faced by immigrant families?
We first used literature review to understand the problem space better. We wanted to understand what challenges are uniquely faced by Asian American families, what factors contribute to these challenges, and how people can address them. We also wanted to understand what technologies and methods are available in the market to aid the problem. As a group we looked into many research papers and shared 23 most relevant to our design question to our common Google sheets doc. It should be noted that these papers are mostly focused on Chinese American families with adolescent children.
Acculturation gap - a result of the child adapting to the local culture at a faster rate than their parent - is a major challenge faced by 2nd gen Chinese Americans
Acculturation gap can lead to family conflicts but there are limited historical studies and intervention programs designed to resolve this issue
The limited studies suggest that ‘qin’, an indigenous Chinese concept most closely translate as ‘closeness’, along with open communication can mediate effects of acculturation gap
We used Google forms surveys as a method to quickly gather insights from second generation Chinese-American children from the age group 18-25. We received 32 survey responses and identified all the potential user groups through social media and personal networks. The survey consists of
Force rank questions like “Rank the following factors regarding "topics that my parents and I tend to disagree about"”
Likert scale questions like “How often do you engage in these activities with your family?”
Open ended questions like “What other topics do you and your parents tend to disagree about”
02. Survey
How do families bond and what role does value differences play in their relationship?
Communicating effectively and discussing a wider range of topics with parents show signs of a decrease in the frequency of conflicts
Knowing about parents’ life experiences can decrease the parent-child conflict frequency
Deeply comprehending and empathizing with parents’ cultural values promotes effective communications.
Families mainly spent time eating, cooking together
We recruited 10 participants using our social and professional network. Each interview was 30-45 minutes long. We started the interview with an open-ended question “What’s your relationship with your parents like”? Based on the answer to this question, we prepared multiple versions of follow-up questions. We employed IDEO methods 5 Whys to understand the underlying motivation of particular actions. The semi-structured interview probed into turning points for the parent-child relationship, coping strategies, and underlying goals for the relationship. We employed affinity mapping to find themes from the interview.
03. Interview
How do families identify, discuss and learn about life experiences and value differences?
Some children understood the gist of their parents’ immigration story but most admit they didn’t know the details
Key Findings from Affinity Mapping
Regardless of family closeness, parents rarely shared their emotions
Understanding detailed experiences creates sympathy which has a positive impact on their relationship with parents
II. Empathize
Personas
From the insights generated via research, interview, and surveys, we created three user personas...
Primary persona
Secondary persona
Anti persona
III. Ideate
We started this project with the broad goal of improving relationships between Asian Americans and their parents. With our research results, we successfully refined our design question.
Design Problem
How can we encourage Chinese American young adults and their parents to share emotions regarding their life experiences?
Design Objectives
Long-term:
01. Users can feel closer to family members.
02. Users can understand how values are formed due to different life experiences.
03. Users can view parents as humans outside of ‘mom’ and ‘dad’ roles.
Short-term:
01. Help users to learn and share detailed life events with family.
02. Help users to feel that everyone has a chance to share during family conversations.
02. Brainstorming
Everyone brainstormed and sketched at least 6 ideas. We then collectively fleshed out each idea, and choose the top three based on originality, feasibility, and effectiveness.
Individual brainstorming
Idea One - Intelligent photo album
Idea Two - Feelings Dishes
Idea Three - Values card game
03. Collective Concept Development
We decided to further develop the ‘Feeling dishes’ concept because...
The product should focus on memory and emotion sharing
The product should leverage existing bonding times and minimize the introduction of new devices or routines.
Building on top of this concept, we collectively iterated on the details
We scoped down the product to chopsticks and chopstick holders. This feels less cumbersome than requiring users to leverage utensils, bowls, and additional accessories.
We decided to build a companion app for comprehensive services, such as storage, notifications, and further in-app interaction.
04. Storyboarding
After going through all the problem areas and ideating on possible solutions, we listed down feature lists and scenarios in which users will use our product. We used storyboarding as a medium to explore different scenarios and the user journey users will follow while interacting with the product. This helped us further on developing the user flow for the product.
IV. Implementation
01. User Flow
The aim is to construct a content and navigation system in a way that makes easy for the user to adjust to the functionality of the product and find everything they need without many efforts. We worked in depth to understand how the navigation would be structured and to ensure content is in place where user would expect to find it.
Flow 0 : Set-up
Flow 1: Users having dinner together synchronously (in-person or virtual)
Flow 2: Users having remote dinner asynchronously
Flow 3: In-App interactions
02. App Information Architecture
03. Prototype
Physical Prototype: Feelings chopsticks
We built the physical product by using magnets attached to the ends of store-bought chopsticks and chopstick holders. We glued cut-out sticky-note paper with written prompts onto the ends of the chopsticks.
Concept Art
First Iteration
Second iteration
Digital Prototype: Companion App
Low-Fidelity/wireframes
The intention was to generate as many ideas as possible in the form of rough screens. Multiple iterations were made of the same screen to choose the one that suits the users’ needs.
04. Usability Testing
We tested 9 users in total across the physical product and companion app.
Physical Prototype
Testing Objectives:
Do people feel optimistic about the solution and find it comfortable to share stories in such settings?
Are users easily prompted by the given topics and emotions?
After addressing high-level comments from the first round of testing, the second round of testing was conducted to understand if the user flow was easy to navigate. This includes setting up the activity, knowing when it’s their turn, tapping the chopstick, sharing the memory, and passing on the turn.
Findings:
Topics and emotions were scoped well. Most users shared a story in under 1 min.
Users felt optimistic their family would try this and stated it is a better alternative than other more intrusive board games
Users had difficulty remembering the activity instructions since this employs a new form factor. Additional guidelines and improvements to the onboarding process were needed.
Interactions with the chopstick holder were most naturally done via the chopstick rather than fingers.
Companion App Prototype
Testing Objectives:
Usability testing for the companion App was conducted to understand if the user flow was easy to navigate. This includes the set-up of physical products and own account, instruction manual for gameplay, management of personal recordings, and interactions with other users.
Findings&Iterations
Users found onboarding instructions too long to remember, they need to review previous steps.
Improvement:
Added a back button so users can go back and forth between instructions.
Before
After
Users were confused with the location of my recordings.
Improvement:
Moved my recordings to the profile page
Before
After
Logging in by google accounts or OTP is preferred mode as users forget passwords often.
Improvement:
Added options to log in with google and OTP
Before
After
Users couldn’t understand the meaning of the numbers in the comment button, and had difficulty identifying each member in the family space.
Improvement:
Altered the UI to make it more evident.
Before
After
Users found onboarding instructions too long to remember, they need to review previous steps.
Improvement:
Added a back button so users can go back and forth between instructions.
Before
After
Users were confused with the location of my recordings.
Improvement:
Moved my recordings to the profile page
Before
After
Before
After
Users were having difficulty completing the “edit the name of your recording” task. There was confusion with the naming and placement of the command.
Improvement:
Changed the name and placement of the command
05. Final Prototype
Companion App
After incorporating the feedback we iterated on our previous designs to create the final design solution
Demo Video
For users to better understand the end-to-end experience, we made a demo ‘’Wizard of Oz” experience. The video shows how the smart chopstick will facilitate the activity, and how the activity connects to the companion app.
V. Learnings
Through this intro class for Human Centered Design, we all learned so much…
Every user is different and your design will be interpreted differently by all of them.
Design is very subjective so seeking as much feedback at an early stage is beneficial to see the general reaction of users.
We cannot design for every user or achieve all the design goals - scope is important!
Breaking it down into achievable deadlines and keeping iterating the designs as it grows is the best solution.
