The tension between parent and teens
Speculative Design
UX research
My Part
Facilitated team progress with regular checkpoints and synchronized updates.
Interviewed three pairs of participants.
Organized and conducted design coding to interview transcripts and insights.
Comes up with 4 Ideas for the design concepts.
Designed the final booklet of the overall process.
Challenge
Large quantity of Participants: Each group need to find at least eight participants and conduct interviews within two weeks.
Large quantity of Data: Because of large participants number, the data from research is Excessive. This creates intense workload and difficulties analyzing and organizing insights with the transcripts.
Parent and teen conflicts
With the rise of social media in all of our everyday lives, our team wanted to explore the question of how Social media is inserted into our relationship with people.
In particular, we recalled back in high school that some of our friends had parents who tracked where they were and what they were doing. we noticed that this mediative parental behavior was also applicable to social media, and thus prompted our exploration.
A book of progress and concepts
Our final deliverable is a full user research work book, containing secondary research, participants, ideation process, and design concepts for social media in between parent-teen care relationship.
Process
Week 1-2
Secondary Research
Preliminary Research
Problem Analysis
Week 3-6
Primary Research
Participants Recruitment
Semi-structured Interview
Data analysis
Insight analysis
Week 6-7
Ideation
Brainstorming
Concept Proposal
Week 7-8
Follow-up Interview
Feedback Session
Week 6
Optimization
Refinement
Research
Dive deep into social media
Social media mediation is a complex yet well documented topic, which was a great starting point for our preliminary research. This eventually informed our decision to focus on the tensions that arise between parents and teens.
Secondary Research
Teenagers and parents have different understandings of social media’s role in their lives, which often results in tensions in their relationship.
The difference
Tension: Secrecy
Teens tend to behave rebelliously, such as secretly using their phone in bed, when parents limit their time.
Care: Motivations
Parents worry about the digital footprint teens may leave on the internet.
Autonomy: Identity
Social media encourages teens to explore their sense of identity and form social relationships.
Field Research
We conducted field research to include both parents and teens in the conversation.
Into the field
When researching academic articles for secondary research, most studies only showcased either parents or teens. However, it was important for our question to put both parents and teens on the same level, and understand both of their perspectives to properly address tensions or behaviors.
We broke our interview session down to provide both time together, and separate.
Interview Insights
Our five main insights highlighted a difference in understanding in how social media supplements their lifestyle.
From our data, we established that parental mediation methods ranged from strict mediation to more active mediation and guidance.
We also found that older teens would generally have less mediation than younger teens, though this is still dependent on the parent’s mediation style.
Ideation
3 core design principles
After interview with 9 pairs of parent and teens, our team comes up with 3 core design principles and started ideating on potential design concepts.
Fostering communication about different social media opinions in order to reach an understanding on why teens find social media helpful, and parents find social media risky.
Educating parents and teens about different aspects of social media including, risks, appeal to use social media and bridge the generational gap.
Focusing on strengthening the parent-teen relationship through a better use of social media while being mindful of potential conflicts.
8 Selected
Out of the twenty initicial ideas, our team ultimately selected 8 to present to our participants in a follow-up interview.
45-minutes Follow-up Interview
Based on peer critique and discussion, we moved forward with selected 8 sketches, which we then brought back 3 of our participants in a 45-minute interview.
In the interview, we made sure to differentiate our speculative and earnest designs. We received some feedback, and proceeded to make changes
Above is our team's final deliverable booklet about our process and design concepts about social media in-between parent-teen care relationship.
Conclusion
What I learned?
First off, good research always takes more time than you have. We had questions that came up after our participatory sessions that we wish we could go back and ask, and the analysis process can’t be rushed. In an ideal world, we would be able to do all of this, but part of the process was understanding how to work with what we have and move forward.
Throughout our research period, we learned to set our own assumptions aside (ex: the answer to our question likely leans a certain way), and let our participant’s experiences guide us.
Lastly, we gained a newfound appreciation for designing speculatively—designing towards a solution should not be the only goal, and there is immense value in designing to explore.
If I had more time...
While we were thorough in crafting our field study guide, it would’ve been beneficial to take more time in flushing out our interview questions to gain insights on participants mediation methods, family dynamic.
Similarly, we wish we could’ve gotten more feedback for our final concepts as well as structuring the session better.
Finally, within data collection, we would’ve liked develop our cultural probe to improve its effectivity.
