Designing a Shared Calendar Video Messaging Tool


to connect grandparents and their grandchildren over distance

OVERVIEW


This phase of the project focused on ideation and designing a prototype to facilitate communication between young grandchildren and grandparents. 

Using the design recommendations and guidelines from Phase 1, we considered and discussed a few different design paths and compared it with the available and related work in this area. Design concepts were validated with the target demographics and iterated based on the feedback. 

The final design path is a shared calendar video messaging system called G2G (Grandparents to Grandchildren) designed to be used by young children (5-10) and their grandparents over distance to communicate with each other and share their daily activities.  


ROLE

HCI/User Research Lead

Work with stakeholders (committee members) to ideate a design solution, sketch, wireframe and prototype, design a concept validation test, collaborate with an engineer to develop the prototype.

 

METHODS

  • Lit Review 
  • Competitive  Analysis
  • Wire framing
  • Concept Value Test



Process

In this part, I will describe the Phase 2 of this project which focuses on ideation and prototyping. Having design recommendations from Phase 1, we started to brainstorm different design paths with the stakeholders of the project (my committee members). Finally, I prioritized the recommendations, narrowed the focus and created the following design guidelines to consider in the design. 

 


Literature Review (Secondary Research)

I started looking at different tools designed for grandparents and grandchildren available in the market or as a research prototype and to identify if any of these products already had applied any of these design guidelines. This process is similar to what is common in the product development as competitive analysis. You can read about this process in more details here (page 20-49 and 85-125). 

 



Ideation

We decided on the final design path to be a shared calendar video messaging system called G2G (Grandparents to Grandchildren) designed to be used by young children (5-10) and their grandparents over distance to communicate with each other and share their daily activities. G2G aimed to be a shared calendar for facilitating communication and awareness through visual media and asynchronous video messaging. The design consists of three main components. 


Iterations of the Prototype

G2G design is inspired by calendars available and understandable by young children. I explored different physical and digital calendar designs available for children between the ages of 5-10.

For designing G2G, I ideated and sketched different design ideas. These ideas were iterated, refined and combined over time based on the feedback from my committee and UX designers.

Different design concepts were validated with some potential users. I showed the sketches and the wireframes to a few children, parents and older adults as well as 2 UX designers to make sure the interface is easy for the target users to use. These sessions led to few different iterations of the prototype and resulted in the final design of G2G.



Final Prototype

Here you can see the main features of the final prototype. 

 

I worked with an engineer to develop a fully functional web-based application based on the design. As we wanted to evaluate the G2G in the field, we needed to make sure that the prototype is error-free and stable to be used by young children and older adults. 

The prototype first was evaluated in a pilot study with two families for 2 weeks. Based on the pilot study, I fixed the usability issues with the prototype. Based on their feedback, I also added some features such as “deleting feature”, “notification” and “monthly view”. These new features added to the final design. 

This video shows a child posting stickers and a video in G2G.

As you could see, Videos are color coded and posted to the sender’s space by default and can be seen by all family members. Users also have the option to directly reply to each other.

In this following video the girl first watches the video posted by her grandma and then replies to that video which will be posted to her grandma’s space.