Famo

A multi-sensory portable family mood tool

Teams

individual

Tools

Figma,
C4D, Blender,
Arduino, M5Stack,
Photoshop

Timeline

Jun 2021 - Aug 2021

Method

Survey,
Think-Aloud,
Interview,
Affinity diagram,
Storyboard,
Prototyping


What if we can record and share emotions？
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1/Record by pinching!


2/Share by approaching!


Systems Diagram
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To meet the needs of different scenarios, the Famo system consists of 3 parts: physical object, mobile app and website.


The Full Experience
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How it works?
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1/Physical device


You can choose the emotion that fits your current state of mind by squeezing it, and the intensity of the emotion will be determined by the amount of pressure exerted.

2/Record&Share


By bringing Famo's physical device closer to another device or clicking on View App, you can learn the emotional needs of family members, give family members emotional support, and avoid emotional neglect.

3/Famo's website


The web-based mood statistics can be used to quantify daily, weekly and monthly moods, helping people to understand their mood trends, regulate their moods in a positive direction, and cultivate a positive emotional environment at home.

How I got  there

Background

Many chinese families face problems of emotional neglect

According to the Mckinsey study, Chinese people express their emotions far less frequently than other countries. Chinese subtle culture makes the expression of love more in the actual contribution to the family, such as earning money to support the family, taking care of the young and old, rather than the verbal expression of 'I love you'.
As a result, parents who are not good at expressing emotions tend to be more inclined to respond to children with vehemence or indifference, and are not even comfortable with or avoid any moving scenes. This then leads to the phenomenon of emotional neglect in the family. Sadly, children brought in this family mood tend to hide or suppress their true feelings to their parents.

400 millions

47%

72%
Chinese say family members are embarrassed to say they love each other
of parents who have neglected the emotional needs of their children
of young people said they would not communicate with their parents about emotional issues.

Exploratory Research

Emotional neglect may be closely related to the family emotional environment...

To further understand the problems of emotional expression in the phenomenon of emotional neglect in families, I conducted an exploratory study. I used a combination of questionnaires and secondary literature. Through the exploratory study I obtained the following findings.

Problem

WHY IS THIS HAPPENNING
Through the questionnaire, I found that parents rarely express emotional topics and especially reject the expression of negative emotions. And it is difficult for children to accurately describe their own clarity in communicating their emotions, or even to hide their emotions in order to please their parents.
01 Lack of family emotional education leads to neglect of emotional expression

02 The emotional expression of children aged 6-12 years starts to change from excessive venting to introverted regulation, and it is difficult for parents to detect the emotional changes of children if they lack attention.

Key Finding

WHAT CAN WE DO
Through literature research, I have found that children's ways of dealing with emotions are mainly derived from imitation of their parents. When children are emotionally neglected, they also become unexpressive of their emotional needs.
★For families with children aged 6-12, it is important for parents to realize the importance of emotions and learn to manage their own emotions, and then parents can educate their children. Finally, They can create a positive family emotional environment together.

Secondary Research

How might we creat a positive family emotional environment?

Next, I used literature research and expert interviews to find ways to help address emotional neglect. The main references were IAA Process( Identify/ Accept/ Attribute/ Act) and RULER skills( Recognizing/ Understanding/ Labeling/ Expressing/ Regulating)
Finally, based on the family emotional characteristics and emotional management process, I summarized the following 3 stages that help to enhance the family emotional environment: Recognize, Verbalize, Manage, and decided to look for user pain points and find design opportunity points in the next stage of user interviews.
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Exploratory Research

3 Families, 3 Tests

Next, I interviewed 3 families and set up 3 different sets of interview topics to try to understand the problems of parents and their children in recognizing, expressing, and managing their emotions individually and with each other.

I used synthesis methods like affinity diagramming to narrow in on a few key insights :

Generative Research

Family members participate in creating a positive family emotional environment

Based on the insights from generative research, I created the persona of a families with children aged 6-12. I expected to identify characteristics, Bio, goals, pain points.

HOW MIGHT WE
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Ideation

Ideation

Design Principle

With my background research and design values in mind, I identified the design principles.

Ideation

Concept Ideation

Then I ideated 30 sketches, ideas ranged from physical objects, peer support, communication tools, sensory experiences, and games.

Ideation

Two Directions

I down-selected to 2 concepts that facilitated engaging the different senses. I established 2 co-design sessions with our target users.
● Emotion Plant
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A plant installation that nourishes through mood. When family members return home, they select the mood flower of the day and the plant tree grows with each mood recording.
● Emotion Cube
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Family members can each carry a cube to help them record and share their moods at any time. And the cube can be used for some fun interactions to switch or view each other's moods.
+ Can have quantitative visual feedback
- Difficult to summarize the mood of the day
- understand the mood of the flower color
- Cannot be recorded at any time
+ Can be carried around to share emotions at any time
+ Has a cute expression display
- Parents will consider the impact on learning

Research

Selected Concept Direction

This session helped us narrow down the mood box and left us with some key insights:
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1/
Children wanted feedback from their parents and more interaction after expressing their moods
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2/
Parents expect to learn more information about their family's description of their emotions
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3/
Parents would consider influencing aspects of learning
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These insights led us to think about the form of the mood box solution, the usage scenarios of each device and the interaction mode. Ultimately, I identified several features of the Famo program as follows：

Feature Mapping

Implementing The Concept

Implementing the concept through features is another big challenge. I directed back to research insights and design principles to map out product features that could truly reflect our research insights and meet users' needs.

Prototyping and Testing



Further deepening  design...
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01
Physical

" What is the form, interactive actions and interface of the physical side of Famo?
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02
Digital
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" How should Famo's digital forms for mobile and web work?

Prototyping and testing

Physical Artifact

First, I tested the form, multisensory interaction and interface of the physical end of Famo separately.

What form is more appropriate?

I thought about the form of the mood box and made models to simulate the usage scenario. The final choice was Figure 4.
Reason1 : Small, lightweight and easy to grip
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Reason2 : The shape of the cube can be combined and put together to interact and easily display image information
● Flat Sphere
● Sphere
● Polyhedron
● Cube

What kind of emotion display interface is easier to understand?

I built a Low-FI prototype with the Arduino and used the Wizard of Oz method to test two mood display modes - sorting by mood type and sorting by mood level.

Finding1: Users prefer emoticons categorized by type because they correspond to their real moods
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Finding2: Users were more accurate in classifying emotions by degree because they were easier to understand

Matching stress values with emotional vocabulary！

Conclusion: Choose the form of expressions displayed by type. Make sure that the number is not too much, and it is better to include the text name of the mood. Besides, I refer to the 4 basic emotions proposed by RULER as Famo's emotion labels. Thus, you can enrich your emotional vocabulary in the process of pinching.

How to create multi-sensory interactive participation?

I created multi-sensory Feedbacks with the help of m5stack to match different usage scenarios-such as tapping, pinching, shaking, and tilt . Then, I asked participants to tell us about which interaction they found more interesting.
Finding1 : Users like to use pinch pressure strength to indicate strength of emotions.
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Finding2 : The shaking, Tilt and tapping operations confuse users. These interactions causes too much trouble to pick emotions, rather than fun.
● Shake
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● Pinch
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● Tilt
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● Tap
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Prototyping and Testing

Digital Design

After the Low-Fi test, I created the Mid-FI model and conducted a utility test with 3 participants. Next, I built out the physical end of Famo through 3D printing.

Which process of the entity is difficult to understand and use?

To evaluate if the design meets the overall design principles and the success criteria I set previously, I  conducted think-aloud user testing over Zoom where I set 6 tasks for each concept. Then I optimized the following points:
01
User flow of recording the user's emotions with artifacts
02
Visual hierachy of the mobile homepage
03
Information architecture & Data visulization of the website

#01: User flow of recording the user's emotions

3/4 of the interviewees can not understand using a long press to record an emotion under the cue of the light. So I added a small hint popup in the bottom right corner of the interface and set a popup to automatically ask whether to record the mood after 1 second of inactivity
●Before
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● After
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01
The light's information cue is difficult to understand, users lack of information to the next page
02
03

Add action tips in the bottom right corner of the page
Automatically pop-up to ask user whether to record the mood

#02: Visual hierachy

I found that users browsing mood records by filtered by date. So the original timeline did not help users to quickly complete the task of viewing the mood of a particular day. Then, I used date to divide the homepage and  chose a more understandable way to mark the date.
01
Users have difficulty finding date information quickly
02
Navigation bar misses text description
03
Consider user reading patterns, use time to separate interface layouts, choose the more understandable content "Today" instead of "15 Fri."
04
Add necessary information for navigation bar and mood cards

#03: Information architecture & Data visulization

Based on the #02 findings, I simplified the navigation of the web by highlighting the dates sorted way. During the interview, half of the interviewees mentioned that they liked the idea of a bottle displaying their mood log, but this quantitative visualization didn't help them understand trends in mood changes. So I chose a mood calendar where users can switch between different visualizations via the right navigation bar.
●Before
● After
01
The commonly used mood data portal is hided
02
It is difficult for users to perceive training results because the data only shows the weighting
02
Set view daily, weekly and monthly mood records as the main goal of user usage
02
Ttrend changes will promote more positive attitude

Final Design

The Design

Photo Story

After a round of feedback, I needed to start thinking about how I was going to bring this story to real life. I created a set of photo storyboards to help me plan out final video.I marked the participation of different devices with different colors.

The Design

How does Famo work？

1/Physical device


The physical end is very small, so you can easily record your mood, check your mood responses, and "approach" to other's Famo to see their mood!

2/Record&Share


Don't know how to express your emotions? Famo believes that by learning  simple emotional expression skills, you can achieve recognition, acceptance and response to others' emotions properly.

3/Famo's website


The web-based mood statistics can be used to quantify daily, weekly and monthly moods, helping people to understand their mood trends, regulate their moods in a positive direction, and cultivate a positive emotional family environment

Project Takeaways

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Tips for conducting interviews with child users

When I conducted usability tests with children, I adjusted the interview time, content, and presentation, taking into account the differences between children's comprehension and patience and those of adults, such as not taking too long for the interview, making the content lively and interesting, speaking more slowly, and keeping descriptions short and simple.
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Emotional Design

As an emotion-related design project, I wanted to give users more emotional connections in the design. Therefore, I added anthropomorphic emotion visual design, gravity sensing on the daily mood page, pressure pinching to indicate the strength of emotions, and gamification of emotion knowledge education. This not only makes the use of the product more logically related to the situation it is in, but also brings a pleasant experience to the user.

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Let's connect!
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newmoonzhang1995@gmail.com
Atlanta, GA, US



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© Luna (Xinyue) Zhang 2023
ScenarioResearchIdeationTestingFinal Design