Team Moose: Final Write Up

Baseline Study (Link)

Baseline Study

Introduction & Problem Statement

Hook’d is a mobile app that helps busy young adults stay connected to their loved ones from afar. As current graduate students that witnessed many of our friends graduate and move to new cities – and as soon-to-be new grads ourselves – this project was exceedingly pertinent to our own lives.

Baseline Study Goals

To understand our users and their pain points, we conducted a baseline study. For our study, we wanted to explore how people stay connected with loved ones who weren’t physically present. Specifically we wanted to see: when are participants most likely to connect? What are the biggest barriers preventing participants from reaching out? Within this space, we find the subpopulation of college students and new grads to be particularly interesting. Specifically, we were interested in the tools, frequency, challenges, and emotional experiences involved in maintaining long-distance relationships  – a relationship medium that we’ve had to rapidly learn and master in order to maintain relationships in our lives.

Baseline Study Methodology

We recruited 8 participants – all of whom are either recent college graduates or current graduate students. Our participants had recently experienced significant life transitions in the form of relocating for education or starting a new job in a new city. To ensure our study captured the right needs, we screened for participants who have busy or rapidly changing schedules, making it difficult to carve out time in the day for virtual connections. 

Our participant pool consisted of young adults who are digitally literate with high levels of familiarity with communicating online. Despite their technical ability to bridge physical distances via virtual communication, they still struggle to do so on a consistent basis. 

We made an effort to recruit participants who were in different stages of a new grad with different types of schedules – from just moving to a new city to a year out from graduating. This would give us a wide variety of data points to understand the gap between the emotional desire to connect with loved ones and how often they do in their busy schedules. 

For each of the 4 consecutive days, we asked participants to record behaviors related to their communication with their friends and family who were in a different location than them. Participants recorded the following data in a Google Sheet:

1. Time of interaction
   1. Understanding when participants engage in virtual communication helps us identify certain patterns in availability and motivation. We can then learn whether certain times of the day or external factors affect outreach.
2. Mode of interaction (e.g. call, video chat, social media)
   1. Different modes of communication have different levels of engagement: active vs passive, attentive vs non attentive, high mental engagement vs low mental engagement. Analyzing this helps us determine which methods are preferred and where there could be room for improvement.
3. Participant location
   1. Capturing where participants are when they communicate helps us identify whether a participants’ environment plays a role in their outreach; for example, do participants communicate more on their commute than they do at home? Understanding the location of outreach helps us discover any physical barriers to virtual connection. 
4. Recipient location
   1. This helps us establish the physical distance between our participant and their contact. Understanding the physical distance gap can provide insights into how people communicate with contacts at different distances; are cross country relationships managed differently than friends or family that live an hour away?
5. Emotions at start of interaction
   1. This helps us understand how strongly communication is influenced by mood, as well as the spontaneity of distanced communication. From this, we can learn emotional triggers.
6. Whether or not they felt closer with the recipient after the interaction
   1. This gives us insight into the motives and effectiveness of distanced communication; are participants feeling positive/fulfilled post-interaction?
7. Brief reflection comparing the interaction with in-person interactions
   1. This provides insights into where digital communication fails and surpasses in-person interaction, helping us establish potential areas for improvement.

After 4 days of the study, we conducted post-study interviews to gather insights on their logging experiences. Below are some of the key questions that guided the study and shaped our objectives:

1. General Experience: How participation influenced communication habits, whether logging impacted their outreach behavior, and any surprises related to their communication patterns.
2. Emotional Reflections: How they felt before and after reaching out to somebody, the emotional barriers to communication, and whether the study changed their perspective on maintaining relationships. 
3. Study Feedback: Suggestions for improving the study in the future, insights on most useful aspects of the study, and recommendations for making the study more meaningful in the future.  

The full details of these post-study interviews can be found in the appendix.

The key findings of this study revealed that the majority of our target audience has a desire to stay connected, but face significant friction in doing so:

• One barrier was the lack of an explicit conversation topic, making participants hesitant to reach out just to catch up with their loved ones. 
• Busy schedules were another barrier to staying connected. 
• Time zone differences (especially across different countries) added another layer of friction, making spontaneous communication even more challenging. 

Every participant described experiencing at least one of these challenges at some point during the study. 

Raw Data -> Grounded Theory

After conducting 8 baseline studies, we analyzed our data by noting key quotes and observations. We noticed commonalities in our data points and created the themes to visualize clusters of related information; themes included family vs. friends, mode of communication, motives, challenges, life changes, and use of memes and DMs. By viewing our data in these clusters, we identified contradictions, patterns, and surprises (see arrows and numbers in the image below), unlocking key insights to inform our next steps:

• Some subjects preferred to reach out to loved ones when they were not feeling great, while others preferred to avoid contact until they were out of their bad mood.
• Many subjects expressed that they like out of the blue FaceTimes and long catch ups via phone calls or FaceTime.
• One subject felt comfortable not responding to people he felt close to.
• Subjects reported that they felt closer after interacting with loved ones via text despite noting that the interaction quality was worse than in person.
• In an online setting, subjects lack the ability to bump into people casually. 

We then re-analyzed our data chronologically over a one-week time period. From our baseline, we hypothesized that one week was needed to capture the emotional cycles that people experience when keeping up with friends, yet granular enough to identify specific behaviors. We created a typical bad week (left) and good week (right), hoping to identify key behaviors and events that cause positive or negative habits. 

Our main takeaway from the chronological view was that long distance relational maintenance cannot be one-sided (meaning both parties need to be bought in and comfortable reaching out); unfortunately, some friends drift apart when both parties aren’t comfortable with digital communication. We identified this pattern by noticing that behaviors on the “good” side involved subjects being proactive about communication while behaviors on the “bad” side did not. 

After visualizing our raw data with post-it notes, we formalized our key insights by using grounded theory and other visualization techniques with the goal of discovering conflicts, contradictions, or anything particularly motivating. 

First, we came away from our raw data and interviews with the sentiment that there are passive and active types of distanced interactions. For example, some find it easier to stay connected with physically-distanced friends by monitoring their wellness metrics via Apple Watch or Oura. While others prefer more active and attentive means of communication – like a FaceTime or a virtual, competitive game. There also exist high-mental investment and low-mental investment digital distanced interactions.

We wanted to continue to explore this 2×2 and understand peoples’ motivation in selecting a medium and how that medium affects their physically-distant relationship.

Key Insights 

From our comparative analysis, baseline studies, and affinity mapping in class, we found several key insights:

• While low-effort, passive apps (TikTok, Instagram Reels) lower the barrier of entry of interaction (which are more sustainable), they don’t foster meaningful engagement in virtual social interactions.
• People preferred the quality of social interactions that were active (FaceTime, iMessages) but often felt that it can be draining and hard to participate consistently, leading to inconsistent usage.
• Gamification like Wordle and Crossword offer a way for our users to be more actively engaged without putting a lot of pressure on them. 

System Models

Inspiration from Grounded Theory

After analyzing our raw data, we wanted to take a deeper dive into both active and passive communication. To do this, we create a cycle for new grads, to try and better understand what goes into each type of communication. For this model, we mapped out a week of activities, thoughts, and feelings related to communication. We also wanted to analyze the variety of factors that go into the process of reaching out to a distant friend, which led us to our second model, the fishbone diagram.

Model 1: Post-Grad Cycle

This model shows a cycle we identified in many of our post-grad subjects. Post grads feel lonely and miss their friends. They are scared to reach out and fear rejection. Finally, it gets to a point where they reach out to friends and they feel positive and ready to maintain contact. However, sometimes the cycle begins again! As a team, we need to identify what causes these subjects to finally act. It would also be helpful to understand when friends reciprocate and why – for instance, does it depend on the mode of communication or level of closeness? Note that this cycle takes place over a week, but we did not label specific days of the week as any of these events could occur on any day. A few subjects had more time and ended up reaching out on the weekend, while others reached out in less busy parts of the week. 

Model 2: Fishbone Diagram

To understand the activation potential behind reaching out to a distant friend or family member, we needed to better formalize the moments leading up to someone reaching out. From our baseline study, we saw that several participants struggled with finding motivation, or even remembering that they had wanted to reach out to loved ones. We found that struggling to find motivation was a real barrier preventing people from actively reaching out to their loved ones. In order to find more factors that prevented people from this active communication, we created a fishbone diagram. This diagram considers the variety of factors that go into taking initiative and reaching out to a distant friend.

Secondary Research (Lit Review + Comparative Analysis)

Literature Review

As a part of our baseline study, we conducted a literature review to see how research currently promotes ways of virtual connection. We found that: 

• Young adults face several barriers to reconnection including lost contact information, social norms around reconnection, the unwillingness to seek help from mutual friends who could facilitate reconnection, and lack of digital literacy (Ibarra et al.)
• Although social media fails to assist meaningful, low-pressure connection efforts, there are certain forms of digital communication that can actually strengthen remote relationships:
  • Mediums of communication have differing effects on relationships. Phone calls foster stronger bonds, while social media interactions are linked to loneliness and anxious attachment (Gentzler et al.)
  • Most college students rely on texting and phone calls for family communication. (Stein et al.)
• Social connection is essential for mental health and well-being. (Gentzler et al.)
• Maintaining long-distance relationships requires strategic communication choice, and individuals must meticulously select their modes of communication to sustain these relationships. (Kuske et al.)

Our full literature review can be located in the appendix.

Comparative Analysis

To get a better understanding of what is currently being done to facilitate virtual conversations and connection, we looked at eight different products in our domain. We have included screenshots of two of these products below:

For each of these 8 competitors, we examined the product’s unique features, target audience, and strengths and weaknesses in order to identify gaps in the current landscape. 

Key Findings: 

1. Innovative features: Locket’s home screen widget feature provides automatic updates, which reduces the activation energy needed for user engagement. This design has contributed to 20 million downloads within its first year and continues to rank among the top 20 in the App Store’s free Social Networking category since its start in 2021, showing a need for lightweight, passive social sharing.
2. Target Audience & Retention Strategies: Platforms like Retro cater to a similar target audience of young adults (ages 18-24), aligning with our target demographic. However, we see that they lack habit-forming elements that drive engagement. For instance, Retro does not have in-app messaging, which is proven to boost by 30% when properly implemented. In addition, we saw that 90% of users who engage with an app at least once a week are more likely to be long-term users–Retro attempts to leverage this behavior through weekly photo update nudges, though its long-term retention is not clear.

Our most critical takeaway is that no existing product balances:

a) promoting consistent interactions 

b) providing a high depth of connection. 

We can see that current products excel at one, but not both. For example, BeReal promotes daily interactions, but does not have the depth of connection that is required to maintain deep and meaningful relationships. BeReal’s notification system helped the app go viral, reaching the #1 spot on the iOS App Store’s free apps category in July of 2022 and a peak of 73.5 million monthly active users in August of 2022. Despite its success, the app does not offer a way to connect deeper beyond photo-sharing and reports have shown a halving of monthly users since. In addition, a significant portion of users are not engaging with the app on a daily basis. On the other hand, studies show that Marco Polo’s asynchronous video messaging allows 90% of users to feel closer to the people they connected with after using the app, but offers no incentive for regularly staying in touch. 

Our research showed us that there is a need for a product that makes it easy to stay connected consistently while fostering more meaningful interactions.  A deeper analysis of all eight competitors that we discovered while conducting our secondary research can be found in the appendix.

Following this analysis, we created a 2×2 map mapping out our competitors in order to get a better understanding of what need our product could fulfill.

Comparative Research Map:

Proto-personas and Journey Maps

Using our findings from our diary study and secondary research, we were able to create proto-personas that represent potential users of our product. Each member of our team created their own proto-persona. 

When creating our personas, we aimed to capture the core challenges faced by our target audience–busy individuals and college graduates that genuinely want to stay in touch with loved ones but struggle to do so due to their demanding schedules. We saw in our interviews there are many barriers to consistent and high-quality interactions and maintaining long-distance relationships, and we felt that Corporate Cole and On-Campus Gavin represent two but highly relevant user groups that cover a broad spectrum of our audience. Both feel disconnected in their own way and experience frustration, disappointment, and guilt over missed opportunities to connect despite having different lifestyles. See our two personas in detail below:

Corporate Cole

Corporate Cole represents a key subset of our target audience—young professionals who genuinely want to keep in touch with their loved ones but struggle due to their busy schedule. As a new grad navigating the post-grad transition in a busy job in a new city, Cole often finds himself playing phone tag, which leads him to feeling out of the loop. He reschedules catch-up calls, and most of his incoming calls and texts go unanswered during his workday as his 6 core college friends are now scattered across different time zones. In addition, he has another work phone and work laptop which keeps him busy enough as is. Although he tries to feebly bridge this gap through asynchronous text conversations and Instagram Reels, these methods are not sufficient for maintaining the meaningful relationships in his life, including his mother who isn’t on any social media and thus misses out on his Instagram highlight reels. 

His experience showcases the importance of creating a low-friction, flexible method for staying engaged with family and friends despite his time constraints. Corporate Cole’s journey map is depicted below:

Key Insights for Corporate Cole:

1. After spending all day focused on his work, Corporate Cole is excited to return home, decompress, and reconnect with his college friends and family.
2. After getting his hopes up, Corporate Cole feels disappointed after failed attempts at reconnection, and feels discouraged from reaching out in the future.

On-Campus Gavin

On-Campus Gavin represents users similar to Corporate Cole in that their busy schedules prevent them from communicating with long distance friends. However, On-Campus Gavin is still in college, and therefore is not confined to a strict 9-5+ corporate schedule. Instead, his days are varied in terms of when he wakes up, works out, goes to class, studies, socializes, applies for jobs, and works at a job. In addition, as the president of the Surf & Gainer Club on campus, On-Campus Gavin juggles many activities at once! Additionally, he focuses mainly on staying in touch with close friends from home and family while balancing a vibrant campus social life. As he runs from the gym to his dorm, he struggles to find 30+ minute blocks for meaningful calls. He is often more available at night after all his club meetings, classes, and late work shifts, but that time doesn’t align with his family’s weekly FaceTime calls, which are in the evenings.  In addition, his multiple competing priorities and constant context switching (especially during midterm season and weekend surf competitions) make certain weeks even more difficult to stay in touch. Although On-Campus Gavin represents college students, this persona may also extend to post-grads with more variable schedules (i.e. not strict corporate schedules).

Key Insights

Our research reveals a common pattern across both personas. Despite the fact that On-Campus Gavin and Corporate Cole have access to multiple messaging platforms, they often struggle to maintain meaningful digital communication styles that work for them and their loved ones. 

Corporate Cole may feel alone in his struggles; with so many of his friends still in the same city back home, it is easy to reminisce about the times where work did not consume his life, and he could easily stay in touch with everybody without being restricted by his 9-5. However, On-Campus Gavin’s journey map shows it is difficult for any individual with a busy schedule to keep in touch with friends and his family back home. Despite Corporate Cole’s rigid routine and On-Campus Gavin’s spontaneous, inconsistent schedule, the sheer amount of events that these two fit into a single day make it extremely difficult to stay in touch with their loved ones, especially when having to account for the recipient’s presumably busy schedule as well. As a result of suffering from this fragmented scheduling and communication fatigue, Corporate Cole and On-Campus Gavin are eager to find a product that can facilitate simple yet deep reconnections, without having to worry too much about manually coordinating their schedules. In a world where the list of tasks to be completed seems to be never ending, Corporate Cole and On-Campus Gavin don’t always have the mental and emotional capacity to figure out the best way to reach out to an old friend or beloved family member. This gap suggests that low-effort and asynchronous methods may help maintain relationships without feeling overwhelming for both Corporate Cole and On-Campus Gavin. We can see that both personas experience anxiety and guilt about maintaining their relationships.

It is becoming clear that this gap aligns with broader trends in digital communication among young adults. Despite the amount of communication tools available to Corporate Cole and On-Campus Gavin, they still haven’t solved the fundamental problem of maintaining meaningful relationships. By addressing this gap, we aim to serve a wide range of users who want to maintain meaningful relationships without the stress of coordination. 

Intervention Design (Link)

Assumption Map + Assumption Testing

After placing our assumptions in the quadrants and reviewing them together, we had each team member to indicate their top three unknown but important assumptions. From this process, we identified the following four key assumptions to test.

1. New grads want to avoid feeling FOMO (fear of missing out).
   1. Test: Track whether deleting social media increases or decreases direct communication with friends. 
   2. Rationale: Unlike nudging or prompting, this assumption tests how participants naturally adapt when a low-barrier engagement  tool (social media) is removed. 
   3. Key questions: Do participants compensate for missing social media with real-life or more meaningful  interactions? Is FOMO truly a driver of social engagement, or do people find alternative digital distractions?
2. New grads would reach out more to friends and family if they had conversation topics.
   1. Test: Providing structured conversation topics and observing whether participants engage more with friends.
   2. Rationale:  We wonder if friction in social interaction is due to not knowing what to talk about,  rather than a lack of motivation. 
   3. Key questions: Do content-driven interventions perform better than pure external nudging alone? Do participants feel more confident initiating conversations when given a topic?
3. Nudging users to reach out is effective.
   1. Test: Comparing the effectiveness of regular nudges in increasing direct communication.
   2. Rationale: Unlike the first assumption, this one tests whether nudges work at all.
   3. Key questions: Can reminders sustain behavior change over time? Do participants become more likely to initiate contact when prompted consistently?
4. We can nudge users in subtle but meaningful ways.
   • Test: We have two groups of participants. While group 1 receives more personal notifications, group 2 receives less personal, more direct notifications.  Each participant in each group receives two daily texts – the morning text prompts them to reach out to family/friends, and the evening text reminds them to respond to any pending messages.
   • Rationale: We wanted to test if outreach can be triggered externally.
   • Key question: Which approach leads to higher engagement and sustained outreach?
     
     

Insights from our Assumption Tests

Our assumptions tests provided valuable insights  for designing an effective intervention: 

• Removing social media alone isn’t enough: People need visible, ongoing social presence to feel connected and motivated to reach out. Users sought alternative channels (which may not always lead to fulfilling or meaningful interaction). How might we create a system that naturally encourages intentional engagement and keeps relationships top of mind?
• People may want to engage but lack the right cues: Conversation prompts may help with this issue but are not a silver bullet. They also tend to work best when timed with timely contextual nudges rather than just a simple nudge. 
• Striking a balance between reflection and intentional nudging is key: Even the act of being more aware of who to reach out to can be encouraging and effective. However, overuse of nudging can lead to notification fatigue, making them less effective over time.
• Direct nudges can be effective but must feel natural and unobtrusive: People respond  best when the cues feel personally relevant and emotionally engaging rather than generic.

Takeaways from our Assumption Tests

We ultimately found that sustainable long-term behavior may in fact require a combination of nudges. While nudges can spark outreach, maintaining long-term change requires a combination of strategies: 

• Contextual awareness prompts to keep relationships visible without being intrusive
• Periodic personalized nudges to encourage sustainable habit-building without overwhelming users
• Opportunities for reflection, allowing users to track and monitor their engagement over time (whether that’s leveling up or customizing their display)

Given these insights,  we believe an ambient display can reduce FOMO and combine the best elements  of all of these nudging techniques.

Storyboards (top 3 ideas for intervention)

After completing our assumption tests, we created three unique storyboards, each of which highlighted a different potential solution to a key user challenge. After discussing as a team, we decided 

Rationale

We chose to prioritize passive reminders over direct notifications to prevent overwhelming users with alerts. Additionally, we found that shared activities weren’t as motivating as a simple reminder of how long it’s been since they last spoke to someone. This approach maintains a balance between gentle nudges and meaningful reconnections. After further reflection, we decided to fully embrace the passive reminder approach by developing an ambient display. This display features fish of varying health, visually representing how frequently users have reached out to specific contacts in recent days. This core idea became the foundation for our intervention study.

Intervention Study

Overview

We recruited seven participants for our four day intervention study that centered around encouraging users to maintain physically-distanced social relationships through avatars and an ambient display. At the start of the study, we sent the following information to our participants: 

Thank you for your interest in participating in this study. Below, you will find all the necessary information about the purpose of this study, how to participate, and what will be expected of you throughout the week.

Purpose:

This study aims to understand how students and new grads stay connected with loved ones who are not physically present. Specifically, we are interested in the tools, frequency, challenges, and emotional experiences involved in maintaining long-distance relationships. Your input will help us gather valuable insights to improve tools and strategies for fostering meaningful connections.

Specifically, we will be asking you for a group of three friends or family members that are physically distant from you that you wish to communicate more with. When selecting this group of three, please try to select:

1. One person you’re already in regular contact with (contact almost every day)
2. One person with whom you interact with semi-regularly (about once a week)
3. One  person who you are rarely in contact with but would like to get closer to

For four days (i.e. the duration of your study) your study coordinator will send you a picture of a cartoon fish bowl with fish that represents your “social ecosystem.” This fish bowl will contain one fish for each of your three friends, as well as an additional fish that represents you. Based on the quality of your communication and the frequency with which you reach out, the fish bowl (and the fish inside the bowl, including your own) will either thrive or languish.

We will be sending you a picture of your custom ecosystem 1-3 times a day, based on your communication with your “ecosystem.”

Participation Guidelines: 

Daily Diary Entries: For each of 4 consecutive days, record the following using the google sheet your study coordinator gave you:

• At the end of each day, log any text, call, or Facetime communication
• Log the emotion you felt before seeing the ecosystem
• Log the emotion after you saw the ecosystem
• Each entry should only take between 2-5 minutes to complete

Expectations: 

Respond to each of the aforementioned questions each of the four days, sending an update to your interviewer at the end of the day. Your interviewer will send you updates of your virtual ecosystem throughout the day.

Results

Our intervention study was partially successful, as five of our seven participants had an entirely healthy tank at the end of the four-day study period. For these participants, providing a visual of the fish’s status was able to successfully facilitate conversations, as all five participants sought out interactions soon after seeing the unhealthy status of their fish. 

Below you can find insights for each particular type of relationship we encouraged participants to maintain:

Category A Relationships (contact almost every day)

• Only one of our participants struggled to maintain these types of relationships, with six of the seven total participants successfully reaching out for each day of the study. 

Category B Relationships (weekly contact)

• Five participants reached out multiple times, one participant reached out only once, and one did not reach out at all

Category C Relationships (rare contact)

• Participants tended to view this group as their lowest priority. Of our seven participants, only five reached out to this type of recipient. The total number of interactions across all our participants is depicted below. 

After analyzing our key insights, we will consider modifying our solution design to treat relationships of different categories differently. For example, users might need more intentional nudges to nurture Category C relationships than they would for Category A relationships.

Below are some example photos we would send to participants to give them updates on their fish’s health status. Each fish with an “X” for an eye represents a relationship that has not been sufficiently attended to, and should prompt the participant to reach out to the corresponding person.

Users expressed a liking for these fish images, with some explicitly saying that they believe an ambient display would serve as a useful reminder to contact their friends in the future. Feedback from these users can be found in the appendix.

Learnings & Insights from our Intervention Study

In post-study interviews, participants expressed confusion regarding which fish corresponds to which of their relationships. We mainly wanted to determine whether or not users care about maintaining their collective fish bowl. However, we know from Fogg’s behavior model, a lack of clarity reduces users’ ability to act on a cue. As a result, in the future we will make sure to clearly label which fish corresponds to which person.  On the topic of mapping fish to people, only one of our seven participants expressed a strong desire to customize the visual appearance of their fish, supporting our decision to leave fish and bowl customization out of the MVP. 

Participants also expressed an interest in automatically syncing one’s texts and calls with our application, so they do not have to manually update their fish status. We will look to implement this functionality in future versions, but Apple’s privacy policies prevent an easy extraction of text and call histories. For now, we will allow users to manually log interactions, and provide easy links to iPhone’s Messages and Phone apps, to minimize the friction associated with reaching out to people. 

Two participants also expressed frustration related to the means through which they received updates on their fish bowls. For example, one recent graduate was not able to reach out to friends and update their fish when they received updates during the work day. By the time the work day had concluded, this participant had forgotten about the waning health of the particular fish.

To round up more of our insights, we found that visual cues are highly motivating. Seeing a fish with an “X” for eyes (indicating neglected relationships) prompted three participants to reach out almost immediately. We wonder if we could make this display playful yet engaging – which fed into our moodboard. This was also something that came up in our discussions around ethical concerns, as we would not want to trigger our users with graphic content. One user suggested simply changing the facial expressions of the fish; rather than representing unhealthy fish with an “X” for eyes, we could simply incorporate health bars. 

🐟 Changes to our Solution Design

Based on the feedback we received, we remain confident in our MVP’s focus on core features: 

• Registration/login: removing friction at onboarding
• Creating/assigning fish to bowls: enabling quick setup of valuable relationships
• Updating fish health status: allowing immediate feedback on relationship “health”

Fish customization, while nice, is not critical to our initial launch at this time. In addition, we plan to add clear, visual labels for each fish so participants can see at a glance which relationship is “suffering.”

Rather than relying on frequent push notifications, we hope that our widget can work itself more naturally to a user’s virtual environment – i.e. Apple widgets – so users can get timely notifications at a glance right from their home or lock screen. We hope this nudges users more effectively than one-time, generic reminders, which we also found in our assumption tests. This intervention study affirmed that participants respond better to personalized, unobtrusive nudges. 

We aim to explore third-party or OS integration that can track calls/texts or can connect to social media apps. We hope by adding this automatic integration while remaining mindful of privacy concerns so that we can reduce the friction for users instead of individually logging who they’re reaching out to.

In future updates, we hope to integrate fish personalization and more empathetic, content-aware messaging. This also ties into the fact that different relationship categories may require different strategies. We saw in our intervention study Contact C (rare contact) may require stronger or more frequent reminders to spur genuine connection. We plan to experiment with our degradation rates or the visuals for rarer contacts so they stand out more, aligning with the insight of relationships that need extra encouragement.

By focusing on a multifaceted system of ambient displays, meaningful visual prompts, and minimal friction, we aim to effectively promote more consistent outreach for participants’ important but distanced relationships. Our intervention study validated our initial assumptions and showed us that engaging visualizations can indeed inspire action, yet sustaining these behaviors requires thoughtful timing, clear labeling, and personalization. We will continue iterating to balance helpful nudges against user fatigue, prioritizing clarity, empathy, and convenience in future updates.

System Paths

Initial versions of our system paths can be found in the appendix.

Process: 

To create our system paths, we thought about the ways users might enter the app and what goals they would try to achieve. We have been working with two personas, but we hypothesized that they would act similarly within our system. Therefore, their paths are relatively similar. 

Key Insights: 

• Users will enter the system after seeing fish that need attention in the widget or to update a fish status 
• Users remain in the system to view statistics about their fish or to continue updating the status 
• We can keep users coming back to the system by keeping the widget up-to-date and making sure our nudges our strong enough for users to reach out to their friends

Story Maps

After reflecting on the key insights from our system paths, a few things became clear. While we initially thought we had two main personas (current students, like On-Campus Gavin, and new grads, like Corporate Cole), it seemed that our app would be conducive to one, all encompassing persona: a motivated user who wants to be better connected. This is because our app’s main system  is passive. So no matter the type of user, the system always operates and responds in the same way. Similarly, our app accomplishes its goal if we can encourage our users to reach out outside of our solution, so while interactions outside the system may differ, everything within our environment is the same, regardless of the user. Now that it was clear we had one main persona, we needed a way to formalize our solution and ensure that we were covering all the goals that we want our persona to be able to accomplish. Story mapping forced us to view our solution from a different perspective; it became clear how the different components of the app came together as a whole to support the user in improving their distanced connections. There are several critical moments that stood out to us. First, signing up for the app is a task that all users must complete initially. Once signed in, users can receive notifications/act on the passive widget, create fish bowls, and reflect on their connections. 

Activities and Steps Overview: 

1. Sign up
   1. Steps: Registration, Connect platforms to the app
   2. Function: This ensures that users can enter the app smoothly. Our registration process includes basic details like name and contacts, authentication,  and syncing other apps (like iMessage) for improved app ability.
2. Create fish bowls/Updating fish status
   1. Steps: Selects contacts for a bowl, add fish to a bowl, select fish in a bowl, toggle frequency expectations
   2. Function: Our solution has users organize their relationships into groups (fish bowls), providing a palpable visual representation of their relationship health. The fish status (i.e. that relationship’s status) is represented visually through the fish’s health. The stronger a user’s connection is, the healthier the fish.
3. Notice passive display/widget
   1. Steps: Text/call a friend
   2. Function: users can choose to set one bowl as their homescreen widget, providing passive nudges through the fish health status. Through the app, users can be sent directly to call or text to reach out to a contact. Our goal is to provide seamless integration with a user’s natural communication ecosystem, making the process of reaching out seamless.
4. Reflect on connections
   1. Steps: Update fish status by selecting a fish within a certain bowl
   2. Function: Our solution offers not only means of communication, but also opportunities for users to reflect on their connections, chart goals, and log progress over time. This will offer another way for users to visualize growth over time and be more encouraged to reach out to others.

After reflecting on our app, its key features, and the insights from our story map, we finalized a list of alpha (MVP), beta, and beta+ features.

Alpha, Beta, Beta+ Justification:

Alpha (MVP):

1. Features: Registration/login/sign out, create new fish, create new fish bowl, and updating fish status
2. Justification: These are essential to the core functionality of our app. These features ensure that users can start using our app, organize basic connections, and leave our app. The main feature of our app centers around being able to see which friends have been neglected, and in order to accomplish this, users must be able to create fish that are assigned to specific contacts. 

Beta:

1. Features: syncing 3rd party apps, contact statuses, fish customization and texting/calling from our app
2. Justification: These features enhance the experience of the app mostly through personalization. None of these aspects would be required for a MVP, although they would truly enhance the user experience and make the app more welcoming and user-specific

Beta+:

1. Features: notification settings, bowl customization
2. Justification: These features add personalization through purely aesthetic changes to the UI, as well as providing different notification preferences.

MVP Features

Below are the features that are needed for our minimum viable product, divided into task groups:

Registration / Login / Sign out:

• Enter name and phone number
• Send magic code for phone number verification
• Login with phone number with magic code verification
• Session management after initial login
• Sign out in settings
• Delete account functionality 

Create new fish:

• Select specific contacts from imported list
• Create default fish designs
• Assign fish to a certain fish bowl upon creation
• Select desired frequency of interactions
• Store contact information and desired frequency of interactions for each fish in database

Create new fish bowl:

• Select fish that have been created from contacts
• Add certain fish to bowl
• Create default fish bowl designs
• Store fish bowl name and fish assigned in database

Updating fish status:

• Select a certain fish
• Update date of last contact
• Store changes in backend
• Update UI to reflect new fish health status

Creating widget:

• Create walkthrough / tutorial on creating an iPhone widget
• Link widget with fish health stored in database

There are a variety of additional features that we plan on adding in later iterations of the app. These include: 

• Customizing fish UI
• Customizing fish bowl UI
• Assigning fish bowls to aquariums, which consist of several fish bowls
• Enabling calling and texting through our platform, rather than requiring users to leave the app to do so
• Allowing for widget addition on Android
• Connect platform with other apps like Spotify, Partiful, Letterboxd, and Instagram to create fish bowls based on other apps
• Calendar view that shows fish bowl progress over time using color

While these features will certainly enhance our product, they are not absolutely necessary to achieve the app’s core goal, and can be implemented in later versions.

Bubble Map

Key Insights From our Bubble Maps

• Keep Settings separate: Our bubble maps also suggest that the account information flows (login, registration, updating settings) can be entirely separate from our core flows related to creating fish bowls and updating fish health statuses. To respect this separation, we will ensure that our settings tab so they don’t clutter any core functionality, such as checking the status of a certain fish or updating contact frequency. 
• Limit information overlap between widget and main app: Our bubble maps also help highlight the relationship between our application and the ambient display we have on a widget. While not perfectly captured in the bubble maps, the main idea of having a small overlap between our two main app components is still prevalent. Showcasing this overlap in our map  serves as a reminder to include some, but not all data in both components of our platform, ensuring that we are meticulously selecting which information we want to display in the widget. With this insight in mind, when we move forward with implementing our intervention we will try to minimize the amount of information we include in the widget. Doing so will increase the likelihood that the user does not get overwhelmed by our ambient display, as well as nudge them to actually open up the app to learn more about their fish health. 
• Prioritizing MVP vs. future features: The bubble maps helped us spot which components are essential for the initial release (e.g., fish creation and bowl setup) versus which features could wait, like the aquarium.

Why these Maps Matter

By seeing possible points of friction (like having to navigate an aquarium before finding a fish), we could simplify our MVP. Completing these maps also gave us some additional context to keep in mind when constructing our assumption map, and later carrying out our assumption tests. 

Interaction Design

Wireflows and Sketchy Screens

From the data and analysis from our intervention study, it was time to start focusing on our solution. Before we made any progress on the actual screens, we created a Wireflow outline to visualize the process of moving through our app. Of course, this starts with signing into our app.

After signing in, a user is able to make fish and bowls to maintain and organize their contacts. A user is also able to reach out to contacts from the passive, nudging widget. We created a wireflow for these two processes as well:

Now with a solid foundation for our solution, and with a concrete bird’s eye view of the tasks we’d have users complete, we started to build out our app screens. We each sketched different screens and gave feedback to each other. Then, the original sketcher went back in and edited their screen based off of the feedback. For example,

Sarah’s Feedback:

• I like the carousel layout because it helps you be more intentional with one bowl rather than getting overwhelmed with several bowls (see tile layout)
  • I wonder if the home and profile buttons should be at the top, while the edit/add fish buttons should be at the bottom.
  • Maybe you can add descriptions/health bars below the “Bestie Bowl”, which you can view if you scroll/swipe down
  • Where does the home button take you? Should we swap out the home button with the settings icon?
• If we did the 1 tile layout, how can you view other fishbowls? Would there be a back/home button here to see the other fishbowls?

Relevant Points/Key Insights:

• Creating the wireflows and sketchy screens helped us understand our solution at a higher level, before getting into the digital design and code.
  • Sign-in needs to be quick and efficient while also still capturing a lot of user information like 3rd party preferences and contacts
  • Creating a fish and a bowl are intertwined; lots of the requirements for creating a single fish are relevant to creating a bowl. We will look for ways to synthesize these two main tasks
• We realized that lots of our usership depends on our users noticing the widget. This means we need to pay special attention to how we design the fish and represent a user’s status with their connection.

Moodboard and Style Tile

Now that we knew what our general solution will look like, it was time to dive into the design patterns and details. We first made our moodboard which served as a visual representation of our brand.

From here, we were able to further define our app-specific systems and expand what we wanted our app to look like.

Relevant Points/Key Insights:

• Finding the balance between our passive app system (widget nudge) and the user acting on the app is crucial. This is how we can keep users coming back and utilizing our app and its underlying behavioral systems.
  • Ensuring that our brand is welcoming but also encourages action is paramount here.

Prototype + Usability Testing

From the style tiles, we created our first digital prototype with the main tasks (sign-in, create a fish, create a bowl, edit a bowl) implemented. 

We then tested our prototype 3 different times in class on a total of 6 people. We had user testers complete the following tasks and asked the following questions for each task:

• Sign Up
  • Is it clear that you now have an account associated with your phone number?
  • Are there any account creation steps that you were expecting but never encountered?
• Create Fish
  • Did the transition from the login flow to the main application surprise you?
  • Is it clear that a certain fish is associated with Eli’s contact?
  • Was it clear what the frequency goals represented?
• Create Bowl
  • Do you think it is possible to add a contact to a bowl before creating a fish for them?
• Contact Friend / Update Fish
  • Was it intuitive that you were able to swipe through the bowl to see more details?
  • Do you think the use of color could overwhelm the user?

Full Usability Test Link

Relevant Points/Key Insights:

• Users appreciated the core functionality but suggested clearer UI elements, more intuitive navigation, and better explanations of app concepts.
• Improved and streamlined messaging integration, onboarding, and interaction flows would enhance usability.
• Our terminology, logo design, and fish-bowl associations need refinement to align with user expectations.

Final Prototype

After receiving feedback from our user study, we edited our prototype and incorporated the feedback. We focused on several main points.

• We redesigned our logo and onboarding screens to better inform the user about our app and its intentions, tasks, and functionality.
• We fully revamped the fish design to make the visuals more aligned with our moodboard and style tiles.
  • The new fish designs express strong emotion (good for eliciting an emotional response from the user) and have an improved visual aesthetic to support our brand
• We fully implemented the connections between task flows so the prototype was more connected and fluid.

Final prototype: https://tinyurl.com/team-moose

Relevant Points/Key Insights:

Our redesign enabled us to achieve the delicate balance between active usership and passive nudges. By leaning into the behavioral theory from class (anchoring new habits with current phone usage, passive nudges, etc) we were able to effectively implement our final prototype.