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Describe your project

PROBLEM STATEMENT

Communication between younger (13–30) and older (40–60) generations within families is increasingly fragmented. While both groups actively engage with digital media, they do so on different platforms, with different habits, languages, and interests. As a result, everyday conversations often feel shallow, repetitive, or disconnected, limiting opportunities to share personal stories, values, and experiences that could strengthen relationships. Existing social media platforms are not designed to support intentional, cross-generational interaction. It targets content consumption rather than actually collaborating with others. There is a need for a simple, inclusive tool that bridges this communication gap by helping family members surface and share their personal interests, such as posts, links, news, or topics, from multiple social media platforms into a shared, private space. With the support of AI, the app can curate, suggest, and remind users of content worth sharing, lowering the effort required to participate and making engagement more natural for all age groups. Gather allows user to build a shared space for their family, where they not only learn each other's interest but also collab with them.

Describe your research process and findings.

User Pain Points

• Cross-Generational Challenges
• Different digital ecosystems: Younger and older generations use different platforms (TikTok, Instagram vs. Facebook, WhatsApp, news sites), making it hard to share or discuss content naturally.
• Conversation gaps: Family conversations often default to small talk, repeated topics, or silence due to lack of shared reference points.
• Emotional distance: Older generations may feel left out of younger family members’ interests, while younger users may feel misunderstood or unheard.
• Cognitive overload: Existing social platforms are noisy and overwhelming, especially for older users, discouraging engagement.
• High effort to share meaningfully: Manually finding, explaining, and sharing content across platforms feels time-consuming and awkward.
• Lost opportunities: Personal stories, interests, and life experiences that could foster learning and empathy often go unshared.

User Goals

• Help users discover and understand each other’s interests across generations.
• Provide easy conversation starters that translate online interests into real-life discussions.
• Encourage storytelling and knowledge sharing between younger and older family members.
• Reduce the effort required to participate, especially for less tech-savvy users.
• Create a safe, private, family-centered space distinct from public social media.

Root Cause Analysis

1. Younger and older generation have a gap in communication WHY?
2. Because they don’t share meaningful experiences and stories anymore WHY?
3. Because the UX of help is one way. Younger children usually play the role of “teacher” and older parents is a “student” WHY?
4. Because most platform are complicated, and it's built for content consumption or status updating rather than collaboration WHY?
5. Because there isn't a place where family members can share their interests, hobbies with their family only without being distracted by other features or people.

Business / Design Goals

• Bridge digital and emotional gaps through intentional content sharing rather than passive scrolling.
• Use AI to curate, suggest, and remind users of meaningful content to share without feeling intrusive.
• Design an interface that is accessible, intuitive, and age-inclusive.
• Support long-term engagement.

Describe your most important design decisions. What research findings and/or user testing results led you to make these decisions?

Finding: Family conversations default to small talk because members don't know what the other is currently interested in digital spaces.

Decision: "We created a "shared space" - a visual summary on the family wall that highlights the top topics being explored by family members this week, providing an instant 'entry point' for their daily life conversation.

Family Centric: From our secondary research, we found that there's a need for a space where family can share their littlest moments in life, or just simply their interest with their family.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2024/01/ST_2024.01.25_Parents-Young-Adults_Report.pdf https://www.spglobal.com/market-intelligence/en/news-insights/research/2025/12/social-media-in-the-us-is-still-driven-by-a-generational-divide?utm_source=chatgpt.com

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