Overview

Client
Stanford Longevity Design Challenge

Timeline
Design Challenge: Sept 2018 - Apr 2019
Product Development: Apr 2019 - Present

My Role
Product Design and Research Lead

Team
Ismail Azam (Business), Lillian Tran (Public Health), Ashna Mangla (Bioengineer), Rani Cochran (prev Technical Writer)

Background & Impact
‍The Stanford Longevity Design Challenge holds an annual competition to encourage innovation in the longevity space. We formed a team across generations with four UC Berkeley students and a retired Apple technical writer to tackle their annual challenge.
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Competing against 97 teams across 24 countries, our team ultimately won first place at the Stanford Design Challenge, and were awarded a total of $11,000 to develop and scale the product. We then recently won first place at the UC Berkeley Collider Cup, where we were awarded with a final-meeting opportunity at a venture firm to pitch for $50,000. Product development and testing of the product are currently ongoing.
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Due to legal agreements, I am limited in how much I can disclose about our project.

The Challenge
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Design an experience, product, or program for intergenerational impact

The Problem
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After some initial research, we chose to focus on addressing issues of loneliness and intergenerational connection.

Our Solution
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A storytelling-based card game that uses prompts to open dialogue among friends, family, and new social contacts and thus alleviate loneliness and break intergenerational barriers in a feasible, no-tech way.

Research

As the only team member with a background in design and research when we began our challenge, I led our team through the entire design process and outlined the sprints. For research, I discussed the advantages of user research, shared my knowledge on conducting interviews, and guided the team through distilling insights.

Secondary Research
Given the broad challenge, we conducted secondary research to help us discern which problem areas in the space of longevity would be best equipped to take on. Our key findings revealed the devastating impacts of loneliness across generations as well as the issue of intergenerational connection, which led us to focus on these areas at the key problems we wanted to address. [Further secondary research has been omitted due to legal agreements, please contact me if you are interested in learning more.]

User Interviews
After distilling to intergenerational connection as our problem area of interest, we interviewed with individuals across generations to get a better sense of the scope of the problem.

College students
2 UC Berkeley students
(age 19-21)

Baby Boomer
1 parent (age 44)

Generation X
‍3 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute Participants (ages 55+)

Industry Experts
UC Berkeley healthy aging PhD
Public Health company co-founder
UC Berkeley Social Work Masters

Reframing the Problem Space

‍After getting a better sense of the problem space and speaking to users, we narrowed the problem we wanted to tackle to:

Key Insights
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[Omitted due to legal agreements. Please contact me if you would like to learn more.]

Ideation

Brainstorming/Competing Concepts

After distilling our problem space and insights, we began brainstorming a number of different solutions. We then dot voted as a team, as well as discussed the pros/cons of each top concept, before moving forward with testing our final idea. We ultimately went forward with exploring the story-telling based card game since we hypothesized it would be the most feasible to implement financially and easiest to adopt and learn how to use for users across generations.
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Game Design
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After iterating on the game design through user testing, we developed and refined the game mechanics. We believe that our game’s success in connecting people is largely due to the unique design of our game, given that the game is modeled after the real-life experience of forming strong relationships. With consideration to every detail (from the game mechanics to the font size and color), our game was carefully designed to ensure that our game can be played by all generations. Unfortunately, we cannot currently disclose further details on the game mechanics due to legal agreements.

User Testing

Tested with 90+ Users

We improved and validated the game through extensive user testing, conducted with 90+ users across 8 testing sessions representing 5 different generations. A survey at the end of each session revealed that 91% of users are ready to purchase the game.

Key Insights
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After each user testing session with various users, we distilled insights and rapidly iterated on the game. [Insights omitted due to legal agreements. Please contact me if you would like to learn more.]

Reflections

I had two key takeaways from this project:
1) It made me more confident in the skills I already have
As women in business and tech, it is very easy to doubt our skills and contributions. However, recognizing my contributions to the project’s ultimate success – e.g. that I primarily led the team through the design and research process, came up with the card game idea during the brainstorming session, created the pitch deck visuals which strengthened our credibility, etc – made clear to me the value I can bring to teams I work with.
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2) I experienced, firsthand, the value of being in a diverse team
‍This is easily one of the most diverse group of people I have ever worked with. Each team member had strengths that we all learned from, and it was by far one of the best team experiences I have ever had! Every team member’s background and unique skills helped me grow in the realms of public health, business, entrepreneurship, public speaking, and content writing. By being around like-minded individuals who were mastering their respective fields, It helped me learn quickly about what I did not know.

Product development and testing of the product are currently ongoing, so stay tuned!

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The winning team at Stanford!

Inaara Charolia

Stanford Design Challenge