Creating Connection with Generative AI
ROLE
Product Designer
Lead Prototyper
TEAM
Sonya Surapaneni
Jacqueline Guo
Michael Zaslavskiy
SKILLS
Visual Design
Interaction Design
Prototyping
TIMELINE
1-Week Sprint for Design Competition
TOOLS
Figma
Protopie
BRIEF
How can we bring parents and young adults (16-26) closer to one another?
OVERVIEW
Life transitions occur for both parents and children from high school to college to work
Both
Experiencing a major shift in terms of their roles and personal desires.
Parents
Redefining their roles as parents and rediscovering their personal selves.
Young adults
Empowered to create lives of their own and discover paths and relationships.
CHALLENGE
A generational divide of effort and savvy
Parents
Have more spare time and are more willing to spend time with young adults.
Are familiar with technology but tend to struggle with accomplishing complex tasks.
Young adults
Struggle to make time to spend with their parents outside of milestone moments.
Grew up with technology and are familiar with complex interaction patterns.
INSIGHTS
High school graduation marks the end of 93% of the time you’ll ever spend with your parents.
In our research, we stumbled upon this harrowing realization from "The Tail End" by Wait But Why. This coincides with a realization among young adults that life is short and time is limited.
The closest distance between two people is a story
To really know someone, you have to know their stories. As it stands, we tend to have a limited view of our parent's lives and often aren't even aware of the rich stories and experiences they haven't gotten around to sharing.
You need the right conditions to tell stories
For stories to have their intended effect as facilitators of bonding, we need the right story at the right time. Since there is no replacing a special moment, and given our constraints, we hoped to facilitate conversation through prompts.
Our hope is that young adults hear a snippet of the stories they weren't aware of before and then are able to ask about it the next time they meet their parents, if not over the phone.
SOLUTION
Custom mini crosswords about your parents on Mother's and Father's day
Ultimately we landed on leveraging the NYT Mini, which has seamlessly integrated itself into the daily habits of many young adults (10 million daily players) and fosters the right environment for storytelling, along with adding a seasonal dynamic to it to foster a sense of urgency.
Additionally, the NYT has established it's brand reputation on sharing authentic stories, a hallmark we aim to preserve and expand upon in crafting this experience for our users.
ASPIRATIONAL SOLUTION
Our solution in 3 steps
Below is an ideal flow we envisioned for our solution where AI would be able to listen to parent's stories and create unique crosswords for their children. AI is not currently at the level to achieve this. We will explore alternatives in the next section.
Step 1: Onboarding (Young Adults)
Step 1 involves helping young adults learn about our event on the NYT Games home screen. The main challenge here was balancing giving people ample time for discovery while limiting the window to create urgency.
Young adults learn about the event and share it with their parents who will be onboarded about the event and be prompted to share their stories which will become the prompts for the personalized NYT Mini on Mother's Day.
Step 2: Creation (Parents)
Parents receive the invitation and are prompted to create the personalized crossword by telling stories. The main challenge here was to make the process easy for parents to interact with while keeping them engaged.
Step 3: Consumption (Young Adults)
On Mother's Day, young adults are able to solve the personalized NYT Mini created by their parents and hear about the stories behind it. The challenge here was incorporating stories to the existing flow and continuing the conversations beyond the experience.
TECHNICAL LIMITATIONS
AI struggles to make crosswords
In creating our solution we ran into a severe technical issue: AI is just not able to create crosswords to the extent that we would need for our solution. This led us to have to take another look at our creation process
IDEAL SOLUTION
Step 1: Unrestricted storytelling
Our revamped three step process to empower parents to share their stories with young adults begins with a blank crossword canvas. We prompt parents for their stories and use their responses as the first few answers of the crossword.
Step 2: Directed prompts
The initial answers introduce limitations to the board. Our solution will be to find answers that fit the space and prompt parents for stories related to the answer words we identified.
Step 3: Filling in the blanks
For the remaining spaces, we will opt to utilize a word bank of pre-prepared Mother's / Father's Day words to complete the puzzle.
REALISTIC SOLUTION
The ideal solution won't work either
Even with us cutting back on our reliance on AI for large parts of our ideal solution, there is no denying the slim likelihood that our proposal will not be feasible or viable for a while because:
Effort
With its massive user base, the manpower required to bring this to life is unrealistic.
Quality
The NYT has built a reputation for its emphasis on quality which will be threatened by the errors AI is prone to make.
What we can do today
Puzzle editors can create a themed crossword for everyone and collect parent stories using prompts related to the answers that young adults can access after completing the crossword.
WHAT ABOUT THE DETAILS?
We presented our 5-day project to a panel of 15+ product designers in media
If you're curious about the nitty gritty of our process, don't hesitate to reach out to hw3617@nyu.edu and I'd be happy to bring you through the thinking. Thanks for following along!
