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Tuki
"YOUR HAPPY HELPER AT home"
Electronic Model Research
Coding and Programming
Knowledge
Creation
Business Management & Growth
Facilitating
Communication
Plans
Service
Strategy
User
Centered
Value
Creation, Exchange,
In-use
PROJECT TYPE
MY ROLE
TEAM MEMBERS
DURATION
Brieana Nestler
Alexys Scott
Miaolin Sheng
Wenting Zhu
Xiaoxiao Chen
1.2020-3.2020
Service Design
UX Research
UX Design
Video Composing
Service & UX
Design
PROJECT BACKGROUND
Tuki is a toy buddy who assists children in staying on track and remembering all of the important and exciting events in their lives. While the physical bot assists children, an app can help parents assign routines and tasks to their children in a fun, engaging way, allowing them to remember what's coming up next and keep track of their progress.
PROJECT BRIEF
TOPIC EXPLORATION
We started with eight broad topic spaces to design within: Pregnancy, Memory, Human Trafficking, Disabilities, Autism, Visual Impairment, Group Therapy, and Elderly people in commercial spaces
TOPIC EXPLORATION
In order to make a fair and effective decision within the team, we decided to design this metrics including factors like:
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Feasibility: By examining the possibilities of technical limitations in Arduino, using AI to make something, and the realism of creating a full support system memory was agreed upon as a more feasible topic.
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Desirability: Would these be products people will want and keep was our priority questions. In this category, while pregnant women would definitely buy into the product because of the market space available, the possibilities of extending the system outside of pregnancy was limited. Again memory was unanimously a more desirable product.
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Accessibility : Given how many children versus pregnant women we have access to research and test with, memory became the winner again.
SECONDARY RESEARCH
Early in our research, we stumbled through how we were to tackle such a broad and very well established field. Are we concerned with linear mechanical cognitive processes or contextual situations we use memory? Within the topic of Memory, we also questioned what type of memory are we exploring?
SECONDARY RESEARCH
Long Term Memory is categorized as sensory,
working, and long term; memories are encoded and
then recalled in various contexts. Long Term Memory (LTM) in particular is largely divided into two categories, the implicit and explicit. Procedural
memories are implicit, they are unconsciously recalled, such as the steps in brushing your teeth.
The memory is unconsciously recalled and completed with little conscious thought. Explicit memory on the other hand is that which is consciously recalled upon, such us remembering a family holiday or the state capital of Georgia during an exam
Within the Topic of Interest of Memory Development in Children, early on we knew we wanted to create something for children and their memory development, but still questioned what part of the memory process are we investigating?
Through our research of Memory Training in Children, we found a prime age range of 5-14 years old, since this is when Long Term Memory really begins flourishing.
Chil Psychology Research has found that within the brain sections, Memory development is traditionally described through means of neurobiological and cognitive processes internally within the brain. However, when designing new technologies this purely neurobiological perspective neglects the complex contextual moments in which memo.
We followed a sociocultural approach to memory, specifically the development of children’s memory. A sociocultural framework of memory “recognizes that in development the individual child is situated within a social context that draws on a large complex of cultural understandings and knowledge structures which provide aliment for memory.”
PRIMARY RESEARCH
PRIMARY RESEARCH
Our research goal was to discover Teachers, Parents and Children's experience with emotions, memory practice and retention (short or long). As a team, we developed a thorough series of Cultural Porbes, Interviews, Drawing Studies, and Observations to interact with participants that will narrow down our research.
Based on the subfield of Human Computer Interaction: Child Computer Interaction, we learned that whatever we designed would need to utilize repeated interactions, symbol recognition, and a gamified system to keep children engaged with our product.
RESEARCH RESULTS
CULTURAL PROBE
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Children love animated characters
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Children repeat what they know
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Children want colorful balloons
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Children need encouragement
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Don't restrain the thinking of kids
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Parents are very protective of their kids
While we had interesting takeaways, this research method was found to not be the best methodology to tackle the complexity of the issue we wanted to explore.
INTERVIEW
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Parent Have Negative Assumptions Of Children Forgetting -Parent 05
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Children Really Do Forget Steps Of Processes -Teacher 03
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Children Have a Hard Time Verbalizing Memory Description -Parent 04
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Emotional Attachment to A Memory Allows Effective Encoding -Parent 02
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Children Get Easily Frustrated When Technology Doesn’t Work -Child 03, Age 8
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VUI Is Not Designed For - Children Child 01, Age 7
DRAWING STUDY
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Children understand that there are multiple steps to complete the task.
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Words and drawings help children depict the steps
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One child even used color to help highlight the steps
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Children struggle to recall and communicate steps within a process.
OBSERVATION
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Children really doforget steps of a process
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Easily frustrated when technology does not work
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VUI NOT designed for children
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Very particular and know what they want
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Frequently say “I don’t know
Understanding how children encode
and retrieve long term memories
based on sensory cues
Participants ( 15 in Total)
5 Children / 10 Parents
CULTURAL PROBE
CULTURAL PROBE
According to Interviewees, children need assistance with retrieving all types of Long Term Memory, often lose items, forget procedures and episodic memories.
Participants (16 in Total) / 5 Children (Age 5-10) / 6 Parents / 5 Teachers (Teaching children in age 5-10)
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
Topic: How to brush your teeth
Goals: Tapping into procedural memory / The system that children use to link steps of a process / Things children remember of a day to day process
Participants: 5 Children (Age 5- 10)
DRAWING STUDY
DRAWING STUDY
Hyper aware of our interactions with children and studying their memory informally
OBSERVATION
OBSERVATION
IDEATION
IDEATION
As a team, we affinitized the research data and developed individual concept sketches based upon key points to bring forward ideas that could be implemented in the design development.
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HMW
1. Enhance children’s Experiential Memory (EM) retrieval?
2. Support parents efforts in this process?
3. Use AI to assist with this memory retrieval?
4. Create a children’s AI personal assistant?
CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT
Through two main concept we compared storyboards and refined model designs for effective performance, child-ike toy and
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CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT
Initial Concept A
Tuki as a happy helper that assists children with their daily routines, to keep them focused and excited to complete tasks assigned to them by their parents. The support App allows parents to assign tasks to routines and then be communicated in a fun gamified way for the child.
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Initial Concept B
Capi is an interactive lamp that is able to capture memories of both the parent and child in order to continue building collective family memories . At the end of each day families can come together to have real conversations based on the data collected by the mobile capi device and turn on a colorful light for the day. Capi keeps 7-day memories & lights of a week .
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PROTOTYPE
PROTOTYPE
The comparison of the two main concepts Tuki and Capi helped examamine the Pros & Con's, as well as suggestions by participants, through a quick concept tesinting into the final design. We also tested low-fi Wireframes layouts within the paired app.
Quick Concept Testing
TESTING RESULTS
Function (for parents):
● Routine setting
● Suggestions for plan
● Progress tracking
● Completion visualization
Function (for kids):
● Task Guide
● Voice encouragement
● Progress tracked by Light
Appearance:
● Eyes
● Lights to show the progress of week ● Round shape
Heuristic Evaluation Based on Nielson’s 10 Usability Heuristics Modified an existing Heuristic Evaluation Checklist (Pierotti)
Key Features
1. Visibility of System Status
2. Match Between System & Real World
3. User control & Freedom
4. Consistency & Standards
5. Error Prevention
6. Recognition Rather than Recall
7. Flexibility & efficiency of use 8. Aesthetic and Minimalist Design
9. Help Users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
10. Help & Documentation
Basic Info can help Tuki better understand users so that Tuki can support parents to organize time and make plans by give auto suggestions.
Completion tracking can help parents’ better understand their kids and make plans.
The Scenario follows a morning routine of a child during a school day, following a step by step activities that need to be considered for further Parent App activity set up and child interactions
FINAL DESIGN
© ASHLEY MONTALVO | 2021 | SERVICE & UX DESIGNER | ashleymf5@gmail.com
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