Summary

Reach helps you synchronize your schedule with your family to find more opportunities to call, message, and visit them. Share your calendars, sync reminders and organize events with your family and show them that you're never too far from reach.

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Problem Space

As we get older, we tend to spend less and less time with family members as our schedules become busier. People don’t call or visit their parents at home as often and tend to only make time for them during the holidays.

With the availability of social media, it should be easier to connect with family members with this platform by having the ability to keep tabs on what their doing in their lives.

Research shows that two thirds of social media users cite family connections as a major reason to use them. But being able to connect online doesn’t necessarily give a meaningful relationship with your family members than portrayed. Some studies indicate that an increase of social media usage actually leads to a decline in communication with friends and family and gives a false presence.

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Research Insights

After doing some research and conducting interviews, I gained some common insights on why some people don’t reach out as make time for family. My main interview questions were based around why people don't visit home, how often they visit or call home, their relationship with their family and reasons why they moved out.

Here are the 3 main insights I've taken away from the interviews:

1. If there isn’t anything important to call about, then there is no real reason to call. It’s not a common things to call to ask “How are you?”
2. Holidays, birthdays or big events are reasons to visit, but if nothing is going on, then there’s isn’t much point to take the time to visit.
3. Things like their schedule gets too busy, so they can go weeks or even months without visiting their parents and not even realize it.

These insights showed me that finding time is a big factor in why there is a decline in communication between family. When they moved out, it was hard enough to find time for themselves let alone other people. But how do we fix this?

How might we find more time in our schedules to connect with our family?

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Persona

Creating a persona based on my research will help me empathize with the user and figure out the user's painpoints and find out opportunities to solve their problem.

Michelle, the Workaholic

"I’d like to visit my family more often but I don’t have time to organize my schedule."

Michelle is 25 years old and works full-time. She works 40 hours a week and commutes a total of 2 hours a day for work. She has night time classes two nights a week and uses a lot of her extra time studying and finishing assignments. Weekends she’ll spend time with her boyfriend or friends to keep a social life going.

Experience Map

Michelle doesn’t have time to visit her family at home or call home that often, and she wants to find time to hang out with everyone. She wants to schedule a meetup with her family and the map shown here is her experience trying to organize this event.

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User Stories

By creating a number of different user stories, I was able to find some of Michelle's needs and explore the direction of the product I will be building.

Categorizing Cards

Organizing each story into categories will determine what this product will do and focus on.

Core Epic - Schedule

Syncing scheduling events and reminders between groups of people so everyone gets notified at the same time.

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Solution

After writing stories and creating a persona, I’ve come up with a solution to create a product that has the ability to sync, share and organize your schedule with someone else.

This product will help people find time for their families by syncing their calendars with family members to find free spots in their schedules to call, message, video chat or visit, giving them more oportunities to make time with each other.

It will also give let you create shared reminders that will sync with the shared calendars so everyone will be notified at the same time, ensuring that no one misses anything.

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Task Flow

Once I have a core Epic I can start drawing out a task flow for my prototype before drawing it out. This will help me determine what screens I want to include and how the product will work.

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Sketches

Before wireframing, I drew out some ideas on paper, exploring different scheduling functions with group reminders. I explored adding a calendar and suggested events as well as how inputting the information might look like.

Wireframes (Round 1)

Once I had an idea on paper, I brought it into sketch and started digitally creating my wireframes. Because I was designing for Android, I designed it based on Google Materialize guidelines.

User Testing

The next step was to test out my product so I brought it to invision and started user testing to determine it's usability. I wrote down the results of the testing to update for the next iteration of my product.

Wireframes (Round 2)

After getting the results from testing, I updated my wireframes, and did more user testing. The results were good so the next step was high-fidelity.

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Prepping for Hi-Fidelity

Since my product was brandless, I needed to come up with a brand. I decided to name my brand reach and chose a colour pallette for my UI.

Hi-Fidelity

After all the testing, branding and building out the UI, here is the prototype that became what is the Reach App.

I wanted the UI to be simple, clean and high contrasting so everything is legible. I made the functionality of it very linear so it would be easy to complete functions without any confusion.

Prototype

Here is the final prototype mockup.

Results

The results of my products usabilty and features came out to be very positive, with people wanting to have something that would help them find the free gaps in their schedule to make time for their family members. Here are 3 major insights that I received from testing.

1. Unfortunately the task I prototyped wasn't the functionality that people were more interested in. My prototyped showed creating a shared reminder, but people were more interested in finding the free gaps in their schedules.
2. Another problem with my product is that if you create an event, it assumes that everyone wants the reminder. Yes the other users will be notified, but it still assumes that everyone on the reminder will accept it.
3. What makes Reach better than other products out there like iCal or Google Calendars? Is the calendar syncing function enough to make users choose this over those products?

Overall my product does have flaws, and definitely needs improvement. Some of the next steps for the next iteration of Reach would be to explore the calendar syncing functionality and possibly add a voting system to create events between users. Doing these might separate my product from the main products out there.

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