AirHome

An digital intergeneration social platform focusing on home event sharing

Winner of the Design Challenge Competition

Product Designer
User Research, Interaction Design, Visual Design
Adobe XD, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop

Share your interests with like-minded people.
Clink the home events, join the meeting, have fun together.

AirHome feature image_mark your interests

AirHome feature image_explore home events

AirHome feature image_interact with people

AirHome feature image_track your progress

Mark Your Interests

Explore Home Events

Interact with People

Track Your Progress

Build your personalized event lists by answering to onboarding survey

Explore diverse home events and challenges to meet new friends

Join the event meeting and have fun with others together

Check your events and collections progress to keep it up

Challenge Brief
This year's challenge is focused on ideas inspired by the cultural shift that has occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic that support long, healthy, and happy lives for everyone.

"After the Pandemic：Designing the Next Version of Our World" is the theme for 2020-2021 given by The Stanford Center on Longevity Design Challenge.

The Problem User Research Ideation Creation Testing Deliverables Reflection

The Problem

Social Isolation

Back to March 2020, most of the businesses shut down and people were asked to stay at home mandatorily for social distancing. From our user research, we found people feel anxious and worried if they have nothing to do and lose momentum at home. The case became worse because there is a lack of the sense of communality between people; therefore, the the problem of social isolation is defined as our main focus for this design challenge.

Specifically, some of them feel a bit lonely after quarantine because they used to value social interactions before the pandemic; some get frustrated easily while couldn't directly contact others and get things done. And, all the physical and mental problems lead back to the problem of social isolation.

Scale of the Problem

90%

63%

38%

U.S. residents were under shelter-in-place orders during April 2020 (PEW Research Center)

American had felt nervous, anxious when thinking about the outbreak in March 2020 (PEW Research Center)

Baby Boomers has felt depression due to the COVID-19 (NRC Health found)

Problem Statement

How might we create new daily routines with social engagement that encourage people to do something (with friends and family) in the post-pandemic world?

People are unable to live physically and mentally in the lives they desire during the pandemic. After our research, I realized that the COVID-19 pandemic has seriously affected people’s daily lives, emotions, and mental health, especially for older adults reported to suffer higher depression and greater isolation. Even more, people couldn't get the resources they need while staying at home.

This project address the need of people wanting to connect with link-minded people, friends and family. More specifically, I adopt the AI recommendation system to help people create a Online-To-Offline (O2O) space to stay lives enjoyable. Additionally, we also consider the implement of inclusive design on the platform that can be used for every generation.

Survey

From our survey research with 70+ people across the world, we can see people's physical and mental health have seriously impacted by the pandemic regardless of their age, area, occupation...

View the Survey and Responses ➞

The image for how people feel during the pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, how do people feel...

The image for what people are concerned about during the pandemic

People's primary concerns are due to...
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The image for what happen to people after staying home for so long

How staying-at-home affected people...

Interview

I conducted 10 interviews with my teammates. Our interview topics covered:
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① The touch-points and pain points of managing their life during the pandemic.
② Unpack how COVID-19 pandemic affects people’s health and emotion.
③ Learn about people's expectation and imagination of the post-pandemic world.

View Research Plans ➞

Synthesis

I see an interesting pattern of 3 different age groups tend to behave similar, and here are 3 key insights:
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① People are experiencing all the uncertainty that they have never thought or been through, which cause them a huge shift in their daily routine.
② People get negative feelings once they cannot go through the interruption of life.
③ People care about the social connections and they need something to alternate what's missing during quarantine.

View Detailed Research Synthesis ➞

Personas & Journey Mapping

In our 3 age groups of participants, we want to better understand their roles, needs, expectations and pain points before, during and after the pandemic.

From their daily journey, we can see the older adults' emotional variations change more significantly than younger generations also this was based on their schedule each day. In addition, we identified that all generations that people feel happier when they have something to do or are learning something new.

Problem Re-statement

How might we create a safe space that encourages people (especially older population) to be active and mentally healthy at home during the post-pandemic time?

Based on the insights and user pain points, I reframed the problem statement because keeping daily routines and meeting with friends/family are not enough for people to stay physical and mental health. People are eager to seek more simulations and fun things to do. We can see older population is venerably affected by the pandemic, so we'll try to address their issues more in the second half of the project and focus on creating a safe space for all generations.

Ideation

How do we decide creating a web application?

The main reason why we decided to go for a Mobile Web App is because of the accessibility. Through a Mobile Web App, our platform can be used in several devices which will be more ideal and accessible to all generations, and our users can decide to view and experience in their preferred devices.

1. Ideation Statements

2. Dote Vote Session

3. Brainstorm Ideas

4. Prioritization

Each one of us generates 3-5 ideation statements with identifying the user, needs, insights, and corresponded HMW statements

Walk through and dot-vote the statements which align with our problem, then come up with 3 most impactful ideation statements

Based on our statements and insights, brainstorm as much as ideas based on our selected 3 ideation statements through sticky notes

Prioritize the solutions by considering the cross-generation perspective and the innovation sweet spot into 1 final solution concept

Approach

An AI-powered personalized approach that is effective and frictionless for the people to get to know other people

Home Activity Exploration: AI recommendation system to create a personalized O2O space

Nowadays, people are craving for customization and personalization in their daily life. We want something that is special or unique for us. So we generate the event content on our home page based on our user's survey responses. We also include trending and live events that people can explore on their own pace.

On our home page, we include plenty of home activities lists for our users. With one click, they can add preferred activities to the calendar and sync to their daily schedule or directly join the virtual meeting to interact with others at home to keep lives active.

① Answer to Onboarding Survey

② Explore the Home Event Page

③ Reserve Your Spot

④ Check Your Calendar

Approach

Incorporate inclusive design into our design principle and event content design for a enjoyable experience for all without singling out any specific groups

Inclusive design takes all demographics into consideration. Inclusive design takes the process a step further to ensure the application serves everyone who visits our platform. The inclusive design process benefits all users, regardless of whether they have a disability or impairment.

Compensations made for age can also benefit younger people. For example, larger text sizes can be easier to read for people who deal with eye strain or those who do a lot of reading throughout their day. The less work people have to do to consume the content on a site, the more enjoyable they’ll find the experience.

① Display Preference Setting

Our initial action is to include the readability of different display methods on the app. Because for the older adults, they couldn't star at the small screen to digest the information they need, but for younger generation, they like to view information in one page.

Another thing we include is the SMS notification system. Since older adults are likely to read message everyday, our SMS assistance helps delivering direct link to activity pages, recommending, booking, and canceling. Even for the other generation, they can decide if they want to opt in this service.

② SMS Notifications

Approach

Motivate people to expand social connections virtually and stay on track

① Sharing community!

② Keep on Track with Your Progress

AirHome integrate with social functions that people are allowed to keep in touch with others. Additionally, we motivate people to enjoy the fun home events and encourage them to reach the goals through their performance, such as weekly community ranking and new challenges. The feedback we receive on this section are people love to keep tracking on specific events and get performance rewards.

Sharing community gives people a sense of community no matter in the virtual or in-person space, so we create a space or allow users to create their own sharing space to interact with their community.

Keep on track is an inspiring section for people to socially interact with your connections made on AirHome. Also, user can see how well you did in each collection to stay active.

Final Design

Focusing on Elder Generation with Specific Event Topics

In order to align tightly with the design challenge competition, we categorize the event into 3 sections, which is share to care, bring the good old days back, and non-familial intergeneration interaction. AirHome's main value proposition is to provide people who are confined to their space to get a chance to expand social connections across generations and build daily rituals during the post-pandemic world.

The final mockup on how seniors use our web app

Share to Care

You’re not alone! AirHome wants to create a safety net forgiving and receiving support during the uncertainty of post-pandemic time.

Bring the Good Old Days Back

How can we bring people together? AirHome creates an engaging party room for older people to go back to their good old days.

Intergenerational Interaction

AirHome promotes an online public space that encourages supportive relationships between people of all ages and also provides an opportunity of social interaction.

Effective communication is critical for teamwork and collaboration

I and my teammates are not located in the same states during the COVID-19 pandemic, so we utilized many online collaboration tools to collaborate on this project. Inevitably, we faced some challenges, like scheduling difficulties, lack of cohesion, and Wi-Fi channel bandwidth problems, but we went though them by checking-in our progresses regularly and discussing actively.

Inclusion is a hard topic to solve, but we can try as much as we can

We want to like to make our platform be used by all generations, so we consider significantly elder-friendly design and accessibility in our brainstorm session. We received mostly positive feedback from usability testing, but we also got few suggestions that they don't like some features that we highlight for the seniors, and it's not suitable for them.

Focus on how we approach the problem not the solution

To avoid bias, we mixed the interview pool as diverse as we can, but it ended up with we received data that is hard to sort and synthesize. However, we reset our mindset of knowing the goal of inclusive design, we realize the goal of this project is not making the best solution for everyone, but how we approach a problem and how are open to the whole process of getting closer to the user.