Understanding the user

We started with researching what exactly made up a patchwork family (children, step children, parents and step parents) and the problems they faced.

Interviews with the user

To better understand first hand experiences of patchwork families, we reached out to people and interviewed them on the challenges they faced.

Finding places of need

With a better understanding of our users, we created an experience map of some of our focus characters. We flagged places where the user was faced with a problem involving their new family and life.

Researching existing services

Our goal was to help an aspect of patchwork families that was not yet as fully explored, so we looked at existing services available to users to identify what was being covered, and where there could be improvements.

Identifying places of improvement

Finally, we identified areas of improvement and explored possible ideas.

Personas and how might we's.

We spent an ideation session developing our personas, so we had a clear understanding of our end user. In addition, we discussed potential how might we statements, to centralize the problem we were looking to solve, finalizing on “How might we help a patchwork family to get along so they can feel at home”.

Scenarios

To dive deeper into understanding our personas, we took our main persona, and outlined his day identifying situations, problems, and experiences.

Innovation gaps

We then took the problems we had identified from our persona’s day and came up with potential solutions.

Focusing our service

From our ideas, we came up with a focus on a service that will help to bring a new family closer together, and that creates a new home for them in a playful way. We explored a couple ideas to accomplish this, finally focusing on one with potential; a smart game within the home.

Usability testing

Before diving deeper into our solution, we first tested our solution with a group of participants. We created mock smart home group activities for them, and watched how and when they interacted to solve them. We found that our participants worked together to solve the various challenges.

Smart home games.

After our success with the usability tests, we finalized our concept of having games that would interact with smart home objects. The games would be chosen and controlled by a corresponding app. We looked to escape rooms for coming up with concepts of the games, for example, the lights turning out and challenging the user to solve a puzzle to turn them back on. Our games focused on group activities that would be impossible to do without multiple players, allowing our families to interact and connect over a common challenge.