UX Research + Design

Fall 2024
Collaborative

KeyPal

Long-distance friendships are often maintained but hard to nurture, this dedicated companion representing your best-friend nourishs friendships across distances by collecting and sharing moments unique to your relationship.

Nurturing long-distance friendships

After college

Students seek out relationships for guidance, community, and balance. They have expressed that strong relationships benefit and influence them in multiple aspects of their college experience.

But what happens when friends part ways?

Friendships struggle against:

Conflicting schedules
Time zone differences
Excessive effort

Research Goals

How do students navigate the college experience?
How can we facilitate the discovery, pursuit and growth of enriching relationships?
How are long-distance friendships nurtured?

Note:
We started our research very broad and throughout the process we were able to narrow down our focus area resulting in long distance friendships.

Interviews

Our initial interviews were focused on understanding the college student experience, specifically how people navigated this new environment.

Standout responses:

“The moment when I came to the main campus, I tried the Chinese restaurant, and met a lot of international students down there. I felt being at home”.

“Putting myself out there, I guess, because I wouldn't really do that in high school, but now I try to, like I made myself a goal to, like, join clubs and all that. It made me a lot of friends”.

Summary:

Relationships and communications were the most frequent topics our interviewers were mentioning.
Students struggle with work-life balance, often prioritizing work over health.
Having strong relationships, especially friends with similar interests/cultures, helps students’ sense of belonging, thus, improving their mental health and academic performance.
For one questions asking “how did you figure everything out”, we found that new students normally reach out to people around them instead of technologies.
Even if it was difficult, many students stepped out of their comfort zone to seek help or to meet new people.

Data Coding

Understanding data to find common themes

Generative Research

After realizing the importance of college relationships, we invited 5 people to talk about the journey of one of their relationships.

Takeaways:

What helped or enabled relationships:

Doing things together
Similar interests/beliefs.
Being passively present in each others lives .

Challenges:

Different city/time-zone
Busy schedules
Lack of spontaneity

How friendships impact your college life:

Helping and caring for eachother.
Influence in beliefs, appearance and interests.

Survey

We quickly realized that time and distance are big obstacles in friendships, so
we surveyed 38 people and asked them what they wish they could do with their long-distance friend.

“Bake, hike, coexist without zoom or having to put in effort, be silly, be spontaneous.”

Market Exploration

There are currently some products aiming to tackle this long-distance relationship area, for example:

Bracelets that vibrate.
App that encourages water intake by competing with friends (not necessarily long distance).
Shared lamps that change colors.
Phones

The problem with these products is that messages are often vague and they’re mainly targeted to couples. The ones that are less vague are often not meant to be carried around.

Phones have a variety of uses and are not relationship specific, people want something that is catered more specifically to their relationships.

Product Criteria

Sharing feature: Allows to share media.

Casual: Not time-consuming or requiring planning.

Accessible: Easy to reach and transport.

Ongoing: Friends can pick up where they left off.

Concept Ideation

We knew we wanted to include a screen, a camera and a button, as well as a simple companion app.

Our first inspiration were vintage TVs, so we kept the form boxy, however, we realized that it would be hard for friends to connect with this shape and to relate it specifically to their friendship.

We changed the form language to a friendlier and more relatable character, symbolizing artificial proximity and reducing the time/distance barrier.