Grow Along
Relationships can become stagnant over time, which can lead to feelings of frustration and strain. Couples struggle with challenges in their relationships, but traditional solutions like counseling can be difficult to access. Grow Along App aims to solve this in a fun and lighthearted way to bring back the spark in relationships.
Problem Statement
Relationships have many stages and nuances. Some couples experience a breakdown in communication that can lead to a dull and monotonous relationship. Study shows that lacking common goals often leads to relationship dissatisfaction, as well as a decline in connection and excitement.
How might we help couples improve communication and strengthen their relationships by working towards a shared goal?
The solution that we propose is to provide couples with a common goal. Research has shown that having a shared objective can help to bring couples closer together and reignite the passion and excitement that may have been lost. To end this, our app will use the metaphor of a virtual pet, which couples can nurture through a variety of digital activities.
Quantitative User Research
Survey Aim:
To identify the problems faced by couples who are in a long-term relationship.
Market Research - Competitor Analysis
To conduct a competitive analysis, I conducted a systematic review of existing relationship growth apps in the market, focusing on their features, user experience, pricing, and customer reviews.
I downloaded and conducted an analysis of 11 apps that are direct competitors.
.webp)
User Personas
Based on the research conducted, I came up with user personas that showcase “couple mode” or “partner mode” to provide a joint experience for two individuals in a relationship. These partner-mode personas help to maintain the same functionalities while keeping the flow in sync.
Wireframing
User Journey Map
Envisioning the user journey helped us understand user behaviors, emotions, and decisions they made throughout the experience. By entering the journey, couples who feel bored or frustrated in their relationships seek guidance to improve them but are often overwhelmed by the many available resources. This is where Grow Along comes in. Couples find Grow Along in the app store or are introduced to it by friends. Attracted by pet-raising ideas and simple couples activities, they download it and embark on their journey together.
Information Architecture
To reduce the cognitive load and simplify the experience, I came up with information architecture so that we could save time and resources while designing it.
Featured Iterative Prototyping and User Testing
I shortlisted 3 features with the couple - activities like exchanging love quotes, answering love trivia, and offering love coupons to each other. One challenge here was to map and relate the couple activities to pet growth and well-being.
For testing it, we invited three individual users to navigate screens and complete one activity task through the clickable wireframes. We observed their interactions and encouraged them to share their thoughts. From this round of testing, we identified three major findings.
1
All participants felt a high cognitive load on the home screen due to too many prompts. They were unsure about what actions to take and found the text to be too small to read. Additionally, even though they liked the idea of raising a pet idea, the pet image was too small to capture their attention.
2
Two out of three did not notice the frequency of activities available to them after completing one task. They were unsure of how many activities they could complete each day and how these activities could affect the pet’s growth.
3
Two out of three reported a lack of motivation to continue playing the game in the long term. They also wanted to track their progress and see how their actions affected the pet's development, but there was no clear way to do so.
Hi-Fi Prototype
Dimple gets a notification - a reminder to complete the activity of the day to keep the pet happy.
Hardeep gets a notification - Dimple has completed the activity. Now he has to complete it to see Dimple's response
Pet interacts with the users , asking user to complete the activity
Users complete the activity - answering love trivia
Pet responds happily showing growth
Dimple sends her reponse, waiting for Hardeep's response
Hardeep submits his reponse and gets to view Dimple's response
Round Three: Grow Along Chatbot (Wizard of Oz Testing)
-
What: Due to time and technical constraints, we used a user-research method called the Wizard of Oz, which involves interaction with a mock interface controlled by a human, rather than building the actual app.
-
Participants: 5 couples (ten participants in total), two of which were living together and three of which were long-distance.
-
Methodology: Each couple was tested together at one time. One of our team members performed the chatbot, sending and receiving text messages from the participants separately. Firstly, we had the couples onboard by having one pretend to download the app, create the account, select a pet, name it, and invite the other to sign up. Then, the couples conducted three activities together. In each activity, the chatbot sent them pet prompts, activity requests, pet images, notifications, and related app feedback. Couples replied YES or NO, and the chatbot exchanged their responses for them. We offered a 5-minute break between each activity and conducted a half-hour exit interview after completing all three activities.
9/10
Participants enjoyed the overall experience and said that hose activities boost offline and online communication
8/10
Participants felt that the pet prompts and images served as a motivation to take care of the pet and keep doing the activities. They also believed that the pet growth and additional pet options could keep them using the app for longer periods of time.
10/10
All participants/test couples were able to understand how pet stats worked. They also shared they didn’t want to think too much about the rule, and having a basic understanding was sufficient.
1/10
One participant was concerned that playing three activities repeatedly could be boring and suggested unlocking more couple activities after using the app for a few days.
Challenges Solved
-
Balancing simplicity and functionality: Design a user interface that is simple and easy to use while also providing all necessary functionality to help couples grow and maintain their relationship.
-
Collaborative activity features: Designing activities that both partners can participate in simultaneously.
-
Shared progress tracking: Designing a progress tracking system that both partners can access and contribute to promote accountability and motivation.
Future Scope
If we had more time, resources, and funding we would implement:
-
A personal recommendations system based on user preferences and activities and make the pet respond in customized ways to focus on unique couple needs
-
More pets, thorough development, animated pets, more interactivity
-
More culture and gender demographics
-
More testing with couples for a long-term duration to understand the learning curve and user behaviour
Major Results
Here are the major results we received from the test, they were documented based on specific flows in the Grow Along app.
Onboarding
All participants found the onboarding process easy and straightforward.
Activities
All participants thought three activities could create conversations and break the ice between partners. They believed playing those activities could offer various topics to talk about between partners offline. Participants preferred more ways to interact with their partners rather than just doing activities. One participant felt that the visuals of coupons and quotes could be more romantic.Two out of five participants suggested a chat option to connect their partners to follow-up responses. One participant suggested adding a "like" option for partner responses.
Pet
All participants found the pet metaphor motivating and encouraged them to complete activities. They were emotionally connected with the pet’s language and found it cute and funny. However, two out of five participants felt that the pet was too needy. Four out of five participants agreed the pet health/summary flow was helpful because three pet stats were comprehensive parameters to talk about overall pet health and reflect on their relationship journey.
Notification Frequency
Two out of five participants suggested that the frequency of notifications would motivate them to use the app more often.