Rohina Gandhi

APPLE CARE PACKAGES

A four-day design competition in NYC working on the parent-child relationship

Timeline

Painpoint

Validation

Principles

Solution

Decisions

Explorations

NYC Retreat

← HOME

APPLE CARE PACKAGES

An iMessage integration to connect with your parents and let them know you’re doing well

TIMELINE

4 days

October 2024

ROLE

Product Designer

Prototyper

SKILLS

Prototyping

Product Thinking

Storytelling

Interaction Design

TOOLS

Figma

ProtoPie

PAINPOINT

Parents mainly want to know we’re okay, but life gets too busy to reply (to every question)

Our parents are worried more than usual about our well-being, especially when we’re living away from them

VALIDATION + INSIGHTS

Parents and young adults have a separate set of underlying needs that need to be addressed

Conducted interviews to understand what the target demographic needed to feel more connected with each other

Parents want…

To know you're taking care of yourself

Authentic information

Something less curated than a text

A platform they're familiar with

Young Adults want…

Something quick

Something easy but
valuable to parents

SOLUTION

With one tap on iMessage, send a small grid of tiles filled with the most recent updates about your life

Here’s something that goes beyond just an, “I’m okay” but takes the same amount of time as that + is more precious to parents

DESIGN PRINCIPLES

Based on the gathered insights, what did this solution really need?

We derived and abided by these three principles that would meet the needs of both the involved target groups

Autonomy & Control

over your info.

We added in multiple sharing options like ‘City’ vs. ‘Live Location’ to give you flexibility & control over how much you want to share

Balancing Convenience

& Customization

We wanted to make the tiles customizable but also keep it limited so that people don’t gave to spend too much time on them

Family-Centered

Information

We were selective with how many and what tiles we were including and ensuring it was what parents wanted to see

DESIGN DECISIONS

01. Dynamically changing tiles based on your recent activities and inputs

The default set of 6 widgets changes based on your recent activities & inputs. It populates the relevant information from other Apple apps such as your gallery (to show you're eating well), apple watch (to show you're working out, sleeping well and staying healthy), calendar (in case of any flights), etc.

We also intentionally limited the amount of tile options you can swap between to adhere to our design principle of balancing customization & convenience.

02. Making the output glanceable

Keeping in mind that young adults wanted a quick way to send these updates to parents and parents may not always be the most tech-savvy, we designed the curation of the tiles to be very easy to navigate, and the final care package super visually glanceable for parents.

For example, the tiles are big enough to look at and understand in chat without having to click on them and open to a bigger view; the colours are more vivid, to convey a specific piece of information (like the big red circle to indicate a super busy period); and the text was intentionally made more legible than the symbols.

03. Easy-to-toggle states for updating different tiles

Apart from pulling data from different Apple apps, we also included a few custom tiles that you can tap to toggle.

You could do this for location (to provide your parents with your live location or just you city), let them know about how busy you've been recently (light, manageable, vs. heavy workload), and to show them how you've been feeling lately through the 'mood' tile.