Overview

The team were passionate about the healhy relationship space due to the staggering statistics around dating abuse, not just physical but psychological.

With communicating digitally being second nature to young adults, we put our heads down to start researching how we could be part of the solution.

Role: UX/UI Designer

Tools: Figma, Google Suite, Github

Team: Sair Buckle, Kevin Sun, Darya Sesitskaya & Carolina Hurtado -myself-.

Date: Oct ’20 (3 weeks)

Problem Space

Communicating digitally is second nature to young adults.

30.6 millon

Total Available Market (TAM)
18-24 yr old (2017)

33%

US  adolescents are victims to dating abuse

93%

of 18-24 yr olds have smartphones

Research Goal

We want to know how young people learn about what a healthy relationship is in order to empower individuals to identify good or bad signs.

Research Objective
Objective #1
•To understand where teens and young adults learn about what a healthy relationship looks like.
•Do they know what a healthy relationship is?

Objective #2
•What would motivate teens and young adults to learn about what a relationship is?

PROTO PERSONA

Let me introduce Kayla McCulley a young adult in her early twenties, she recently moved to Bay Area to study for a master of Business and Management. She is single, enjoy spending time with her friends, Kayla is going to make you special and important when you became part of her trust circle. She would like to have a partner, but first is discovering herself, managing emotions, and learning her love language. Study a master and adapt to a new place, could be stressed, and start a relationship can generate anxiety, sometimes she wondered if she is a good partner? or if she is in a healthy relationship? On those hard moments, Kayla listens to herself and shares her feelings in a supportive network, and of course, also seek advice or learn about it on digital platforms.

Survey

Our team received over 90 responses to our survey. We have collected responses from multiple age groups.

To the question What are the most important things in a relationship?

Our surprise is people stand out Respect and Communication, and Love is in 4th place. How did this happen? Probably because this survey was done by different ages group, later on in interviews, most of the users says Respect and Communication are Key for a healthy relationship, is one of the lessons of life.

Research: Interviews

We organized six user research interviews that helped us learn really useful data about teenagers.

In order to have a healthy relationship, there needs to be communication.
Users have anxiety about their partners. But they don’t know how to start a conversation.

100% will be happy to have advice before complicated communication questions.  

"Once every few months, we would check in on the relationship and ask how things are going."


-Stephanie, 24

"In order to have a healthy relationship, there needs to be communication. A lot of people have anxiety about their partners."

-Diana, 25

"I value advice that's relevant to what I'm going through. I like information that comes from real people."

-Vanessa, 25

Competitor Analysis

Violence is the oposite of Love. How can we help teenagers to be in a healthy relationship? or how can we help them be more awere about the data and powerful tools about abuse.

33% of American adolescents are victim to sexual, physical, verbal or emotioanl dating abuse, see more data about it in https://www.dibbleinstitute.org/teen-dating-violence/

Websites like "Healthy Relationships Iniciative", "Dibble Institute" and others have powerful data and research in PDF files. So we came with the idea of combine this powerful numbers with inmediatly feedback.

Have you ever used grammarly?
The keyboard plugin that makes you feel stress-less when you write.
We want to take that feature to “provide clear suggestions in real-time”. To dectect easy and fast red flags messages.

Have you ever feel stress about being in a relationship?
“Healthy Relationships Initiative” is a website with powerful data and research about main problems on teen’s relationships like when love turns into violence.

We want to do the same as the Healthy Relationships Initiative website does: Provide data to teenagers but not with PDF’s. How? To achieve this goal we want to do the same way as grammarly does.

Affinity Diagram

Let’s focus on who do people trust for relationship advice?
Who could share advice with our teen audience?
And now we know that Gen Z finds advice from influencers in social media, even when they try to not follow to much, they watch educational YouTube channels, reddit, and best friends.

Insights: Stakeholders

To look at the space from additional angles, we interviewed a women’s shelter manager and a high School teacher to understand what knowledge would help mitigate young people ending up in an unhealthy relationship.

The key insights were knowledge about accessible local health services and that teens are fueled by emotions and this can cloud their judgement.

"Often people don't realize that there is access to a lot of free local resources that can help them when they need It especially for mental health.

- Shelter Manager

"Kids are easily fooled and controlled by emotions. They can't process emotions. If they're angry, they won't get work done."

-High School Teacher

USER PERSONA

From the User Research we developed our User persona. Meet Kayla McCulley!

Journey Map

Based on the research we looked at a standard scenario of a college student getting into a new relationship.

Noah was falling in love, feeling "butterflies in the stomach" sensation.

He feel sexy about been in a relationship, but looks like need time to understand her, he has been insult from his partner, and feel confused, don't know how to abord the situation, so decide give her the opportunity of the benefit of doubt, try to be positive vibes and treat this first red flag as a bad joke.

Later on, they have a fight and then the situation is full of self-doubt, Noah is feeling vulnerable and lonely, having no body to listen him, so start looking at influencers unconsciously and friend relationships online, more confusion to his feelings.

Soon notice that keep a healthy relationship is harder and required a lot of skills, he need to learn more about himself, be sure about his preferences, emotions, communication patterns. Noah finally seeks advice from a friend...

...Does she could help him?

"I am so excited
I have a Girlfriend
My friends will be jealous"

Did she forget the lol or an emoji.
Was it meant to be a joke?

What did I do, am I doing this right?Why is he acting differently?

I should ask a friend? she looks like it’s going well,
will she think I am a failure?

Can I trust my bestfriend with what I am telling her?

Should I break up or talk to her and give her another chance?
I will discover listen myself...

Solution

We ultimately needed to be grammarly for relationships, a keyboard plugin with response recommendation based on AI. Which lead us to our Value Proposition.

Research Objective
Objective #1
•To understand where teens and young adults learn about what a healthy relationship looks like.
•Do they know what a healthy relationship is?

Objective #2
•What would motivate teens and young adults to learn about what a relationship is?

Value Proposition Statement

CommuniKate is a relationship keyboard native plugin that helps users in the moment flag and navigate communication issues.

The AI analyzer looks at communication tone, sentiment, and keywords in all communication used via your mobile to provide advice and reporting.

It will empower the user to know what to say and connect them with resources in a fun, easily consumable way.

We aim to be the first responder to negative communication patterns, we are your friend in the phone.

Paper Sketches

It helps us with brainstorming and found out first design ideas:
- “Vibe check”, keyboard ideas with colorful features
Data / Quizes /  Slogan for our app

User Flow

After onboarding and sign up, we install the plugin. Then we could use from 2 options:
1) Start messaging and use our tone vibe detector keyboard.
2) Or go to tell the app more about us and set our goals first.
From one way or another, we could still land on our home page in order to learn more about a healthy relationship.

Moodboard

UI Style Guide

Our modals and icons are fun, sweet, and joyful.
Color Palette is colorful, our users could feel calm and express their feelings with confidence.
Typography is Proxima Nova, which is a trendy font already using by an app that is popular with young audiences.


Lo-Fi Prototype

We develop the 1st prototype with a bunch of ideas, focus on healthy relationships.
The main core keyboard detects the tone vibes.
Our users find it useful? Helpful? Or interesting?

Key Feedback

We conducted 5 usability tests on Low Fi.After user feedback...

What ideas to build?
1) The tone vibe was considered helpful for 100% of our users.
//Just need to improve it’s clickable.//
2) Our 100% of our users feel curiosity and excitement about their data.
3) Our younger users find lovely emojis in order to express and track their emotions.

What ideas to say no?
• Video feedback, users don’t want to let a conversation to see a video at that moment.
• Notes, users think they are too lazy to write notes.

Mid-Fi Prototype

For the Mid-Fi prototype we implement our Style Guide, and improve the Keyboard with a logo next to it, so our users could notice is clickable and give a feedback on text and instead of the video we used a gift for calm.

Key Feedback

We conducted 5 usability tests on Low Fi.After user feedback...

What ideas to keep?
1) Now, the tone vibe is identify as clickable by 100% of users.
2) The gift for calm down on this situations is helpful and fun for 100% of users.
3) Track your feelings is appreciate //emojis and vibe check should be consistent//

What ideas to say no?
• The cards on home page aren’t clear and is easy to scroll down than to swipe.
• They prefer to see on profile a real picture.

Hi-Fi Prototype

The only changes we needed to make after mid-fi testing were changes to design style and aesthetics. No changes to navigation.

Future Roadmap

Our main goals are to hone Into the core MVP of the keyboard plugin, continue testing and developing content backed by a Relationship psychologist.


Research Goals
• Continue High-Fi Interviews with equal gender proportion.
•Design feedback flow to help AI training.
•Deep dive into accessibility
•Find a Relationship Psychologist to partner with to co-create content.
•Create content database
•Test, test, test