OrcaPod
Keeping Pod-uctive Harmony in Your Family!
Team
She/Her
She/Her
He/Him
He/Him
Problem and Design Overview
Long distance relationships, everyone has heard about them, experienced them, or seen a depiction of them. But in college, a lot of people are forced to navigate the newfound distance between them and their parents for the first time. However, only roughly 41% of college students communicate with their parents daily. This can take a toll on parent-child relationships and cause strain on relationships that are navigating this new distance.
That’s where OrcaPod comes into play. OrcaPod allows participants to track multiple conversations with a person’s parent or children across multiple time zones. In turn, this allows participants to keep their parent or child involved in their lives even while apart. OrcaPod provides an interactive and creative way for parents and children to stay connected even if they may not be able to physically see each other.
Being apart highlights the importance of maintaining frequent connections.
Design Research Process and Key Insights
When designing our solution, we focused on three main things during the research process: problems, reasons, and solutions. In a more in-depth approach, identifying issues that lead to a lack of communication between a parent and child, reasons for the lack of communication, and potential solutions to fix the communication gap.
People have different reasons and issues that come up when it comes to keeping their parent or child involved in their lives. For example, an international student might struggle to keep their parents involved in their life because of the difference in time zone or a student could be in the middle of exams and don’t have the mental or physical capacity to communicate with their parent(s) at the time. Similarly, how we then attempt to solve these issues needs to match the motivations of both parents and their children, or else we risk creating a one-sided or worse, a solution nobody wants.
For our design research, we chose to do three interviews because this allowed us to have an in-depth conversation with people in our stakeholder groups and narrow down our problem space. During our interviews, we asked the participants multiple questions relating to their communications with their parents or children from whom they live away from. For example, we explored the reasons why some of the participants tend to neglect communicating with their parents or children and their daily schedules which leads to a lack of communication.
We chose to focus on international college students, students who live away from home, and parents of students away from home. This gave us a dual problem approach to navigating how to bridge communication issues between parents and students who live away from home.
Technological Knowledge Differences
During our interview with the student who lived away from home in Washington, we learned that they didn’t favor using complicated apps to communicate with their parents while they lived away from home because their parents had a limited understanding of technology.
Lack of Emotions and Depth when Texting
From our interview with the international student, we found out that they struggled with fully expressing their emotions through texts and wished for a better way to communicate their thoughts and emotions with their parents from across the world.
Holidays and Traditions at the Core of Some Family Dynamics
In our interview with the parent and the student living away from home in Washington, they expressed a desire for wanting to continue ethnic traditions and holidays with their parents. Both participants wanted to find ways to continue getting together with their families to celebrate these holidays and traditions or find a way to celebrate virtually when they couldn’t.
Iterative Design Process and Key Insights
Our design focus was primarily on enhancing user interaction with a smartboard, specifically by improving communication across different time zones and ensuring clear communication when one party is unavailable. Our iterative design process started with creating an initial paper prototype of our smartboard. We then ran a heuristics evaluation with another group in CSE 440 to identify and resolve heuristic violations. Next, we conducted three usability tests with three different participants. Our participants consisted of an international student living in off-campus housing, a student living away from home in off-campus housing, and a parent of a student who lived away from home when they were at college for a bit. We chose these participants because the parent had extremely limited knowledge and familiarity with technology while the college students were able to offer insight as people who were familiar with smartboards and technology. We began each test with a summary of our project, design, and explained the two tasks. Then we had participants attempt to complete both tasks with the paper prototype. From these usability tests, we identified multiple issues with our design and workflow, as discussed below.
Initial Paper Prototype Overview.
Final Paper Prototype Overview.
Digital Mock Up Overview.
Favorability Within Modes in Different Demographics
Based on the first and second usability tests, we found that younger participants prefer touch functionality, while older participants favor stylus functionality when using the smartboard or tablet. Additionally, younger users prefer using a keyboard to input text, whereas older participants prefer a combination of writing and voice features for text input.
Bryan is a young participant communicating with their parent, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth is an older participant communicating with their child, Bryan.
Need for Organization and Navigation
Across all our usability tests, participants often lacked guidance on what actions to take. There were many questions regarding the functions and meanings of various buttons on our smartboard. Our design offered too much freedom and caused participants to become lost and struggle with navigation. Allowing participants to input anything on the smart board also resulted in too much clutter and confusion on the screen, making it harder to use.
Final paper prototype added gridlines to assist with participant's navigations.
Digital prototype added gridbox to assist with participant's navigation.
Error Prevention & Option to Undo
During our third usability test there were moments we discovered where the participants entered unexpected numbers or words because our design lacked restrictions on input. We lacked a method to undo these messages, which meant they remained permanently on the smartboard, and this took away from the participant's experience.
Final paper prototype added a way for the participant to hide/show, blur/unblur, and delete messages.
In addition to what has already been added in the final paper prototype, the digital mock up added a way for the participant to edit their messages.
Resulting Design
Our resulting design for the OrcaPod Board consisted of a 72”x40” wall-hung smartboard with a built-in microphone and speaker. The microphone and speaker work in tandem for the voice recording and voice messages that people can send with the board. With this application parents and children can keep each other involved in their lives by helping people avoid manually converting time zones and giving them time and space to communicate at their leisure instead of always being connected in what could be stressful times. The participant can use the board to establish a pattern of when people are awake and able to communicate instead of constantly guessing.
During our design we had numerous iterations. Here we showcase the board's ability to hide, blur, or delete messages, switch between connected boards easily, allow users to use a prefer messagae sending type, and provide guidance on where to write messages.
Practicing and Tracking Conversations Through Time Zones
Here our two participants, named Elizabeth and Ashley for convenience, Elizabeth wants to set an alarm that will notify them when Ashley’s time zone has reached 8 AM. Since they know that Ashley is up at that time and will be able to talk.
The participant goes through the set-up phase and sets their desired time and duration for the other party. Once that has been finalized, they click "Finish."
Afterward, we arrive at the home page and proceed to the smartboard interface by tapping or clicking the respective folder.
Once the time has struck, the participant will click on the box or push the flag down to make the notification disappear. After acknowledging that they've seen the alert, the participant will then proceed to write a message by tapping or using the stylus anywhere on the board.
A keyboard screen will pop up near where the participant taps and can have the option to write, type, or vocalize their message. Once confirmed, the participant can tap or click "Finish" to finalize their message.
Once the message has been sent, they will have the option to delete, hide, or blur their message by tapping the option below it. Once finalized, the other party can see the message and reply accordingly.
The participant can set an alarm for the board to notify them when it reaches a certain time of either their child or parent's time zone.
After the alarm is set, the parent can continue with their day until the alarm goes off.
When the alarm time is reached, the time is boxed and highlighted on the board.
The parent is able to write, type, or send a voice message to the child. They know that their child is awake now because of the alarm.
The parent sends a good morning message to their child in Portugal when it is 8 AM there.
The child sends a corresponding good morning message to the parent after theyhave seen the message.
Communicating When the Other Party is Unavailable
Bryan is struggling with balancing midterms and keeping Elizabeth involved in their life at the moment.
The participant goes through the set-up phase and once everything has been finalized, they click "Finish” and arrive at the home page. Once at the home page, we can proceed to the smartboard interface by tapping or clicking the folder. The participant will see a new message indicating that the other party may not be available and push the flag down, click, or tap the box to remove their notification.
Then the participant can write their message by tapping or using the stylus anywhere on the board. A keyboard screen will pop up near where the participant taps and can have the option to write, type, or vocalize their message. Once confirmed, the participant can tap or click "Finish" to finalize their message.
Once the message has been posted, the participant has the option to hide, blur, or delete their message, and the other party will receive a notification on their board.
The hub page for a pod member.
The board boxes and highlights the new message from the child.
The parent can either type, write, or send a voice message to the child.
End result after the parent sends a good luck message.