Kinnection

Paired digital boards that enable collaborative activity and real-time updates between international students and their families abroad. In this way, they make distant relationships feel more tangible and help students overcome homesickness.

Type
Graduate School Project
Scope
Generative Research
Ideation
Prototyping
User Testing
Team
UX designer (myself)
Visual Designer
UX Researcher
Duration
10 weeks

Challenge

Asian international students endure isolation, homesickness, and cultural adaptation upon moving to the United States.

In 2021, there were 239,466 Asian international graduate students who moved or migrated to the US.

Asian students made up about 60% of all international graduate students in the US in 2021.

Desired Outcomes

This helped us down-select features to design for the final prototype.

Integrates seamlessly into daily lives of both students and families.

Bridges communication through collaborative activity

Makes relationships feel more tangible despite the geographic distance.

Respects the boundaries and privacy of both students and their families.  

Solution Highlights

Synchronized Boards that show real time updates

By being synchronized in real-time across the world, Kinnection boards collaboratively engage users, with handwritten notes adding a personal touch.

Protected Notes for privacy in communal spaces

Protected notes that turn invisible and a screensaver mode add subtle layers of privacy for both students and families.

E-ink Display: energy efficient and feels like paper :)

Designed with an e-ink display in-place of traditional LED screens, Kinnection boards save energy, prevent eye-strain and simulate real paper.

Why Kinnection?

The word Kinnection is a portmanteau, created by blending the words 'kin' (meaning family) and 'connection'.

Why Physical boards?

A mobile app would be easier to access and build. But as we conducted prototype tests, we found that users were very intentional about what they communicated on Kinnection.

Users wanted Kinnection to have its own presence in their living spaces.

My Role in the Process

I Led: Ideation and concepting, feature building, information architecture and user flows.

I Co-led: Ideation and concepting, feature building, information architecture and user flows.

The size of each triangle representing the 4 stages is roughly a function of the time we spent on that stage while designing Kinnection.

1. Discover

We assumed..

students lose their cultural identity after moving to the US;

We interviewed..

9

Asian international students.

We learned..

Insight 1

Students strengthened their cultural identity while studying abroad.

“In a foreign country, you have nothing but your culture to show.”

Insight 2

Students shortly developed new identities due to cultural changes.

“I’ve adapted more to this place, and this place is a place that respects my lifestyle and how I live.”

Insight 3

Existing communication channels were not adequate over time differences.

“It’s been normal for me to not connect with my family, but this challenge is very physical. I call my mom two times each week.”

Insight 4

Students struggled to adapt to a life away from home.

“When everything is going well, you become less homesick - in troubled times, homesickness is heavier.”

2. Define: Ideation and Concepting

Lit. Reviews | Interviews

Ideation Sprint: 90 Ideas

My teammates and I labored over 90 ideas. We did an old-fashioned foam-core board affinity mapping exercise from which promising themes emerged and outlier ideas were sent to a graveyard.

Dot Voting

We used this method to down-select product and feature ideas.

Our 4 design principles were:
Creates shared spaces.
Facilitates sharing life updates.
Fosters genuine communication.
Integrates into daily life.

We assigned a colour to each principle.  
We got 12 votes each, 3 of one colour. ‍

3 Ideas

Final Idea Storyboard

Pictured above is my storyboard of a shared collaborative space between students and their families that solves for a key pain-point: missing updates over timezone differences, augmenting homesickness among students.
‍
Ultimately, we found this to be our strongest idea.

3. Design

3.1 Prototyping + User Testing

My teammates and I created 4 prototypes for a collaborative space, which we tested with over 50 participants in under 3 weeks.

1. Public Board

Test Objective

Public board in a classroom to understand group interactions.

Insight

Participants preferred anonymity in larger groups.

Outcome

Anonymous notes.

2. Friends Boards

Test Objective

Boards exchanged between friends to gauge nature of interactions and board size.

Insight

Participants shared special messages and engaging riddles and games on the preferred larger board.

Outcome

A wall-mounted board instead of a portable one.

3. Family Board

Test Objective

Family board to test location preferences within a family home.

Insight

While participants preferred a communal space (such as the family room), privacy in the presence of outsiders was a major concern.

Outcome

Easy-to-toggle privacy features like hidden notes and screensaver mode.

4. Digital Board

Test Objective

A skeuomorphic digital prototype to test core features and user flows.

Insight

Participants preferred free-form notes over templates such as postcard, letter etc. as the length of their note was not always predetermined.

Outcome

Free form notes.

3.2 User Flows

In parallel to prototype testing, I also created the information architecture and led the user flows which i iterated upon constantly based on insights from our test participants.

1. Creating a new message

1. Empty state
2. Handwritten note
3. Long press on note to create sticky
4. Move note around, edit, change colour etc.
5. Final note

With several iterations, I reduced the minimum number of steps to create a message from 5 to 2. You can see how the notes are free form - the user writes the message directly on the board, and holds down on the text once finished to create a sticky note around it, though the latter is not a requirement.

Note that they're anonymous by default, the writer can choose to sign their name if they wish to.

2. Edit a message

3. Create a task

  1. Move around the note or stay in editing mode
  2. Add a checkbox to the message
  3. Change the background color of the message
  4. Fold the corner to lock/unlock message
  5. Delete or confirm
  1. Toggle to change the note into a task
  2. Add a checkbox to the message

4. Upload a photo

1. Tap on cloud icon to pair device
2. Pair device with code
3. Confirm pairing
4. Confirm photo
5. Enter photo editing mode
6. Add or remove frame
4. Confirm and post photo

5. Locked and Unlocked Notes

Locked note

Unlocked note

4. Delivery

I shot and created a short story, showing a real-life use case of the product. Here, 2 sisters stay connected via Kinnection from different parts of the world; several design features like sounds and light-based notifications are highlighted in the video.    

We won at the Showcase!

Kinnection won the people's choice award among 11 projects. Close to 100 people attended the showcase, most of whom voted. My teammates and I also got a $50 gift certificate to a local cakery :)

What people said..

User 1

"Loved your friendship board prototype. When I first saw it, I didn’t realize it was for a (class) project. Great proof of concept - people actually used it."

User 2

“I think the potential of the product lies in the notification delivery system.” 

User 3

“Would love to see if you can incorporate different mediums (voice, songs, videos, stickers, etc.)”

User 4

“It’s interesting to wonder how it would feel to see my mom write handwritten messages, pestering me to be healthy and care for my body. Usually, it’s annoying by text, but I can imagine the effort of handwriting to leave a more genuine impact on me.”

Hindsight's 20/20

Looking back, what would we have done differently? If we had more resources, what would we use them on?

Mitigating bias by testing with students and families that belong to non-Asian cultures.

Research messaging dynamics among transnational families to open the product up to a broader market.

Adding reminders and prompts.

From usability tests, we learned that users preferred prompts/reminders to encourage interaction with the board and facilitate deeper conversation with loved ones.

Fostering individual privacy on a shared board.

Ensuring privacy with one board in a shared household with separate profiles and accounts.

Designing for accessibility &human factors.

Accommodating for all languages and physical abilities with voice to text, sound recordings, and handwriting to text transformation.

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