Within the spread of the global pandemic, how to prevent asociality during quarantine?

Solving the real-world social challenge emerging from the 2020 global pandemic and quarantine lifestyle. An app designed to increase the family dynamic and allow the users to build interpersonal communication through virtual avatars to interact with family members in different households or even communicate with neighbors. 

The root of the problem

Caused by the 2020 coronavirus disease outbreak, the various social critical phenomenon appears through long-term social distancing and quarantine isolation. Quarantine aims to reduce the spread of diseases. However, it leads to the various psychological result of individual consequences. In this case, we would like to relate to the individual asociality bought by the remote online communication tools for virtual education and virtual working. The quarantine lifestyle accelerates the emerging of an asocial society. Begins from personal observations, the asociality phenomenon is further rising in each household as well. The clefts were built in the relationship between adults (parents/guardians) and children. To improve family dynamics and create more interpersonal communication for family members to interact together, our team decided to expand on the issue and provide a digital solution for this phenomenon.

Task Pal Ideation

Background and Contextual Information

Homes with children have to adapt to the new normal since the pandemic

• Online schools

• Work from home

Parents who relied on schools before the pandemic, now have to tackle the problem of childcare (Stanley, 2020).

Problem emerged

• More difficult interaction between family members.

The pandemic opens a door for chaos in comparison to a normal structured life. It is challenging to interact constructively to build family cohesiveness (NYTimes, 2020).

Which leads to….

Increased negative emotions

• 7 out of 10 Canadian women experienced anxiety, fatigue and isolation (CTV news, 2020).

• 35% of males between ages 35 - 54 felt anxious and 41% of males in this segment felt worried while 51% and 50% of the female felt anxious and worried correspondingly (Angus Reid, 2020).

Increased chores

The statement

We are tackling the challenges of collaborating on household chores under this current pandemic environment in North America. Family dynamics have been put at risk in many households throughout the course of the pandemic. As children stay home and have online classes, and parents work from home, the number of household chores increases and parents increasingly experience negative feelings like stress and anxiety. Therefore, collaboration on chores is more important than ever before. That said, it should be done without putting the family dynamic at risk.

Secondary user Research on families in Canada & US

• Men also did housework in Canadian families, but slightly less than women. In Canada, men spend on average 1.9 hours on housework per day, an increase of 24 minutes per day over the past 30 years, according to new data from Statistics Canada (Huffpost, 30 July 2018). More recent statistics show household labours shift closer to 50/50 for Canadian families (Global News, 2020).

• Half of the children across all age groups say it’s their friends they miss the most (54%) as a result of their isolation, while 16 percent say they miss extracurricular activities like sports or clubs, according to research participated by Canadian children and teens (Angus Reid Institute, 2020).

• 79% of students at the age of 12 and 15 keep up with online school. 51% enjoy it. 54% reported feeling less motivated. 63% reported feeling not that busy (Angus Reid Institute, 2020).

Personas

Bradford

Bradford is a thirty-five-year-old career officer at the University of British Columbia (UBC) who lives in Vancouver with his wife and his twelve-year-old daughter. He is also completing his master's degree online part-time at UBC. As a fan of the Vancouver Canucks, he used to go to watch ice hockey matches before the pandemic with his old fellows to support his beloved ice hockey team. None of his family members enjoy doing chores. Therefore, he shared the chores with his wife fairly even before the pandemic. Life after the pandemic has been challenging for him at the beginning. He felt stressed at first with fulfilling his different responsibilities like remote work, housework and childcare. That said, he has made adjustments to cope. A concern of his is that his daughter increasingly stayed in her room and maybe spent a little too much time on her devices.

Richie

Sarah

Sarah (35-year-old) works as an auditor in New York City. She is a proud working mother and with one daughter at 6 and one son at 12. While she was always capable of juggling between family and work with ease and took almost all the housework for her family before the pandemic, She recently has been struggling with the new challenges the pandemic imposed on her family and herself. As the stay-at-home life began, aside from her housework duty, She has to manage multiple Zoom calls at work and online learning for the kids. She just wished she could have more time but she cannot. She was worried, frustrated and exhausted every day and could barely focus on her work. Maybe it is time to let her family members collaborate on housework. She is also worried that they might be more of a hindrance than a help once the collaboration begins.

Competition Research 

Ourhome has a 4.4 star rating with 1.4k ratings.“OurHome is a new and simple way to organize your family. Kids will be motivated to do chores and take responsibility while parents can reward them for their effort.” (GooglePlay, 2020) Their key features include task system, reward responsibility, calendar integration and goal function

Habitica has a 4.0 rating score with 1.2k ratings. “Treat your life like a game to stay motivated and organized! Habitica makes it simple to have fun while accomplishing goals. Input your Habits, your Daily goals, and your To-Do list, and then create a custom avatar. Check off tasks to level up your avatar and unlock features such as armor, pets, skills, and even quests! ” (GooglePlay, 2020) Key features include task list, inventory, shop, party and guild

Cozi Family Organizer has a 4.8 rating score with 218k ratings. “CoziFamily Organizer is a surprisingly simple way to manage everyday family life. With a shared calendar, reminders, grocery lists and more, Cozi is a 3-time Mom’s choice award winner and the TODAY Show “must-have app for a better life” (GooglePlay, 2020) Key features include a family calendar, shopping list, to-do list and recipe box.

Task Pal App Mapping

Design Features to Help With Problem Area

• Family dynamic

  • Application encourages the completion of tasks that may otherwise increase household tension.

  • Application encourages habit building

• Chore gamification and habit loops

• Affordances based on consumer profile

  • Parents of young children right now generally fall into the millennial generation

  • Use of technology and applications is frequent

  • Children also growing up with mobile apps

  • Our application therefore should not try to reinvent the wheel so to speak

Low Fidelity Prototype

Let’s explore the final prototype!

Here is a short video showing how the app works.

Figma prototype

The feature closeup demo