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PairBear
— Children have a difficult time transitioning to the new lifestyle associated with families of divorce. The relationship with their parent’s is negatively affected, specifically communication. PairBear is a mobile application that pairs with a smart toy to provide seamless communication and reinforce a healthy relationship between the parents and children.
Team
Haley, Shuntaro, Joshua
Duration
12 weeks class project
ToolS
Adobe Illustrator, Figma, CrazyTalk Animator
My role
User interview, User personas, Smart toy wireframes, Mobile application high fidelity prototypes
Design Opportunity
How might we reinforce more communication and healthy relationships between the parent and the child in divorced families?
01. User Research
1. Secondary research
We spent 3 weeks reviewing publish materials about the effects of divorce on children and parent communication as well as existing solutions.
2. User Interviews
We conducted a 30-min user interview with 4 users. One interviewee is a single parent and the others are children from divorced families.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The age of the child greatly affects the relationships that stem with his/her parent after the divorce
Strict schedules for communication with parents were unsuccessful
Traditional solutions such as phone/video calls are inconvenient because of frequent interruptions and lacks privacy
User Personas
Based on user research, we defined two primary users with very different needs.
The child(age range 6 - 12)
This user group has limited access to technology and desires more regular and fun interactions with the parent.
The parent
This user group desires a more efficient tool that keeps she/he updated and communicate with the child
Prototyping
Since the parent and the child have access to different tools, we designed a mobile application for the parent and a smart toy for the child (age 6 - 12).
MOBILE APPLICATION PAPER PROTOTYPES
SMART TOY PROTOTYPE
Final Prototypes
For parents: PAIRBEAR mobile application
The mobile application allows the parents to call and record messages through facial recognition. It also have a mood tracker calendar.
For child: PairBear smart toy
The pair bear smart toy allows the child to record, call and play parent's messages.
Paired smart toy interacts with children
Paired smart toy plays parent’s recorded audio/video for children
Reflection
01 Ease of use
We recognized that it might be difficult for children to remember and use the squeezing commands. Therefore, we suggest to implement artificial intelligence like Siri and Alexa to assist the use of the smart toys.
02 Privacy
While the interactive smart toy is a friendlier solution for children, we should ensure children’s private information is protected. We will make sure users understand we will not share their personal information and have a hard switch for users to turn the product off.
