HEARTH

Prototype link: Link

Describe your project (Max 150 words)

Hearth connects family members across generational gaps and strengthens bonds across distance and busy schedules. It creates an accessible, user-friendly space where families can share memories, organize events, and interact through weekly prompts. Family members respond to generated or custom prompts each week via text or voice recording to share stories and thoughts. Each prompt is preserved, allowing other family members to revisit and react to stories over time. Hearth also includes a space for sharing photos and personal updates so memories don't get buried in the group chat, as well as a calendar to ensure family plans actually happen. By offering flexible, inclusive formats that work for all ages, Hearth fosters understanding, belonging, and collaboration between generations, making it easier for families to share stories and create new ones together and create new stories together.

Describe your research process and findings. If you conducted any surveys or interviews, please include the survey form and/or interview questions here. If you conducted secondary research by pulling from online sources, please include a link to your sources. (Max 500 words)

Survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeUmy4kMKpb5CKsG4ZImNUjFun8qmQ4kgjRXH_qzLOmPO6yFQ/viewform?usp=header

Sources:

Research Approach and Initial Findings

We first looked at academic journals and articles on barriers to intergenerational connection. Through our research, we found that younger generations seek advice about the future from older generations, while older generations want companionship and enjoy sharing life stories. We first envisioned an anonymous platform where all generations could exchange advice and stories together. However, further research made us consider concerns with this approach. Studies showed that users are reluctant to share personal information with strangers online due to scams, toxic behavior, and privacy risks. We also found that people across all age groups fundamentally seek purpose and authentic connection which is difficult to get with anonymous strangers.

Pivoting to Family-Centered Design

This insight led us to focus on intergenerational barriers within families. Families already contain multiple generations in a trusted, secure environment where people already feel connected and comfortable sharing.

Primary Research: Survey Methodology

We conducted our own research through a Google Form about family relationship dynamics. Our survey design prioritized reducing mental load by grouping questions with similar response patterns, keeping it brief, and balancing multiple-choice questions with short free-response options.

Key Survey Findings

After receiving over 50 responses, we created an affinity map to analyze patterns and noticed three major themes:

Current connection areas: Food, movies, and games were the top activities families enjoy together.
Desired connection areas: Meeting in person, traveling, and watching movies together.
Photo sharing: 89% of participants agreed with the statement "I enjoy sharing and receiving photos with and from my family," with 62% strongly agreeing, which was our highest rating across all questions. When asked about communication barriers (multiple responses allowed), participants responded most with distance (75%) as the primary barrier, followed by difficulty scheduling time (55.4%) and lack of shared hobbies (35.7%).

Competitive Analysis

We then analyzed existing family connection apps including Family Wall and Life360. These platforms offer useful features, but often feel controlling and do not incentivise genuine connection. We drew inspiration from BeReal's low-commitment style, which lets users share authentic moments of their lives without pressure which is perfect for busy families who are struggling to coordinate time.Through competitive research, we also considered our app's tone and voice. We developed a warm, welcoming brand identity that reflects our goal of promoting authentic, pressure-free family connection across generations while considering realities such as time and distance.

Describe your most important design decisions. What research findings and/or user testing results led you to make these decisions? (Max 500 words)

Our most important design decisions were guided by our research goal of strengthening family connection despite differences in time, distance, and technological comfort. We intentionally chose to focus on family as our primary user group because it represents the most natural and meaningful point of interaction for most people. From this, we prioritized three core functions: storytelling/connection, event planning, and photo sharing. Each of these were prioritized because of findings from our user survey and secondary research, as well as design principles around accessibility, privacy, and usability.

To address the main problem that family members are often not available at the same time, we designed a weekly prompt feature that encourages asynchronous connection. This allows users to share stories, memories, or silly content at their own pace through either written or spoken responses. Based on our survey and usability considerations, we deliberately placed the “write” and “speak” options side by side with equal visual weight to encourage more diverse and accessible forms of communication, particularly for users who may struggle with typing or prefer verbal expression.

For when families do want to connect in real time, we created a shared event scheduling feature. This allows family members to easily plan both in-person and virtual activities through a shared calendar, making availability easy to see and reducing coordination friction. We also incorporated an invite-only system to prioritize privacy and ensure that only intended family members can access shared content.

Photo sharing became a central feature of the platform based on our user survey, in which 62.5% of respondents agreed with the statement, “I enjoy sharing and receiving photos with and from my family.” In response, we designed shared photo albums, a recent activity feed, and the option to create private albums for selective content. This supports both collective memory-building and personal control over sharing.

In terms of user experience, we intentionally designed a neutral and familiar interface inspired by navigation patterns from Facebook and YouTube, platforms that span multiple generations. Recognizing that Gen Z users are accustomed to dynamic interfaces while Baby Boomers prefer simpler layouts, we aimed for a balanced, intuitive design that minimizes cognitive load. We used large interactive elements, explicit instructions, and minimal options per page to make the system accessible to less tech-savvy users. Visually, we chose warm, soft colors, and a friendly mascot to create a cozy, welcoming, non-corporate style. We paired our signature orange branding with a bright blue accent color for clear action buttons, ensuring that key actions were easy to identify.

If applicable, describe how you utilized AI in your design process in detail. Please explain where AI fit into your workflow, which tools you used, and the specific purpose AI served at that stage. Include a concrete example of how AI influenced a design decision. (Max 500 words)

Competitor Analysis (Research)

In our brainstorming phase, we used AI to find competitors for our competitor analysis of four existing family connection platforms. The AI also helped us identify what features users valued most and where existing solutions fell short.

Writing

We also used AI tools to check our written responses for clarity, grammar, and organization. This ensured our project description and supplemental answers effectively communicated our vision to judges.

Critique

AI also became a final pair of eyes to catch mistakes in our designs and give feedback. After creating High - Fidelity designs, we fed a few of our screens through Claude AI and asked it to critique our designs as if it were a professional senior designer. We think that critique is one of the fastest ways to learn and even though we didn't agree with many of the critiques that the AI gave us, it did give us big picture advice. For example, on one of the onboarding screens we asked Claude for its opinion on why it seemed flat and not inviting. Claude advised us to increase the size of the logo and more color variation, which we then took and experimented with to land on our final design. Another example was we asked Claude to rate our screens on a scale from 1-10 on navigation and usability in order to see what screens we need to prioritize cleaning up.