Goal
Our project is all about how we can help college students connect with their family.
User Personas
Our user personas consisted of three distinct categories of college students: one in a difficult scenario with their family, one wanting to be closer to siblings, and lastly one wanting to connect with their grandparents.
Here are the links to each user persona:
Journey Maps
The user personas along with the rest of the data we had on our participants from diary studies, interviews, and other sources helped us create our journey maps.
Figma link to zoom in on smaller details for the journey map above.
Key Learnings
- There is already friction when contacting family due to a busy college life, but there is even more friction piled on top of this due to the difficult scenario.
- Family seems like a long time thing so feels like less of an emergency.
- Being reminded of family is a peak high where they have a strong desire to love and be loved, but this can quickly be dampened by barriers such as: fear of a negative conversation and being left feeling negative; parents not understanding their life; high-energy consumption from contact on top of being tired from school, homework, and other stressors; and more.
- Because it’s a sibling who is close-ish in age, the relationship is more of a peer relationship, and is between two technically literate users.
- Sam is focused on friendship, and doesn’t maintain this relationship only out of obligation, but rather because they want to gain the benefits of a sibling relationship. However, college life gets in the way because Sam is often busy with other things, and finds it difficult to engage in depth conversations, beyond just a simple text or surface level phone call.
