Summary
Concept: Lumbr is a service that helps families alleviate the emotional stresses of relocating by connecting parents with families in their destination.
Challenges: Creating a solution that applies to the broad variety of experiences discovered in our research.
Teammates: Sasha Bossiouk, Evan Pierre, Ana Massette.
Secondary Research
In our early research we uncovered some surprising information regarding the correlation between how many times a family has relocated and a variety of negative effects this can have on the children of a family that's relocated.
We decided that designing a service that can address the difficulties associated with relocation would be a worthwhile endeavor.
Primary Research
We began by defining relocation as moving from one community to another. We selected our demographic - people that relocated in their early teens, or "tweens," and interviewed subjects that fit the demographic. From the child's perspective a new community can be anything from a new school district in the same city to a new state on the other side of the country.
Affinity Mapping
Affinity mapping helped us realized that the experience of relocating is extremely varied, ranging from mediocre to absolutely traumatizing. The only things that all of our subjects had in common was that at some point things started to get better, and for better or worse, their parents played a large part in what the overall experience was for the children. This allowed us to create 'how might we' statements after interviewing members of our demographic.
How might we...
...get users to the "ok moment" faster?
...generate excitement about the move?
...align expectation with reality?
...strengthen family ties?
Conceptualization
Keeping our 'how might we' statements in mind, we identified the stakeholders, developed personas and determined that the best way to positively impact the experience of teens/tweens was to help parents make the move as smooth as possible for their children. We came up with Lumbr: a service that helps families alleviate the emotional stresses of relocating by connecting parents with families in their destination that have experienced a similar move.
Lumbr: How It Works
- Moving family fills out a profile.
- Lumbr provides a list of families in their destination who have experienced a similar move.
- Moving family selects a family to contact.
- Lumbr suggests icebreakers and conversation topics that may be beneficial, encouraging communication.
- The two families connect, the moving family benefits from the experience of the destination family.
Low-Fidelity Prototype
We determined that the best way to positively impact the experience of teens/tweens was to help parents make the move as smooth as possible for their children. We tested two low-fidelity prototypes for Lumbr.
Family is precious and personal, and as such, people guard them fiercely. We needed to find some boundaries of what people are willing to do, how much they'll let a service into their lives.
The low-fidelity prototypes enabled us to test basic aspects of our concept and see what was appropriate and what might be a bit invasive.
