Family Room 

As part of The University of Melbourne's team in the 2013 OzCHI Student Design Challenge, we designed a solution to addresses the problem of email overload.

We provided a niche solution, focusing on an MVP for disparate families. This would eliminate some of the burden currently on email by making it easier to share photos. Our full solution is documented on our blog.

Note, this problem has been greatly reduced by Apple Photos and Social Media, but was not solved at the time.

UX process

We first understood the problem space by performing a literature review followed by a brainstorming process.

After defining our target we performed semi-structured interviews with 6 participants to understand their behaviours and needs relating to the use of email and other systems for managing and archiving content across dispersed families. 

Affinity mapping was performed to understand the data, identify motivators and triggers and opportunities and potential barriers to success.

From this data we created a rich picture, persons and a picture scenario to help create the prototype.

The prototype was subject to a cognitive walkthrough and guerrilla testing.

Results

Motivations and triggers

For sharing content with family:

  • Showing the kids to remote family

  • Sharing family events with remote family

  • Showing my parents what I’m up to.

For reviewing or archiving content:

  • Showing specific items to others locally

  • Looking at amusing items again

  • Siblings looking back at things to show parents offline

  • Periodic clean out and saving ‘the good ones’

  • Prompted by talking about an event on the phone.

Email perceived benefits

  • Only available option as they don’t use Social Media (2)

  • Easier to search and look back at photos (1)

Email perceived disadvantages

  • Use Facebook more often (2)

  • Email is “too formal” (2)

  • Too many adverts in email

  • Not looking back through old emails (2), but I do through Facebook (prompted by social activity) 

  • It’s hard to find items of a specific type, for example photos of my nephew.

Other findings:

  • Lost all my old emails (including photos) when I reinstalled software on my PC

  • Younger people used Facebook for sharing, despite some concerns about longevity

  • Older people didn’t often use Facebook at the time. This meant sharing and managing items across multiple platforms.

Targets for enhancement / fixing

  • Easy way to file emails or save items

  • Easy search to find old content

  • Way to share multi-generationally

Barriers to success

  • I don’t know how to use email / send attachments / download items for printing or saving

  • Parents don’t have access to email or internet

  • Long-term preservation not a priority; given little consideration

  • Little advance thought given to future needs of the individual and of the family

Related publication

Family room: reducing email overload
Webber, S. E., Heffernan, K. J., Yeganeh, B. R., Estrada, F., & Augstkalns, D. (2013, November). Family room: reducing email overload. In Proceedings of the 25th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference: Augmentation, Application, Innovation, Collaboration (pp. 407-408). ACM.