Chosen Family

A program and app to reduce loneliness in unhoused and housing insecure youths
Timeline: 12 weeks
Year: 2023
Role: UX Research + Designer

Background

The Fung Fellowship is an entrepreneurship and innovation program that teaches diverse undergraduate students to utilize human centered design skills to develop tech solutions that address societal challenges as they work alongside community and industry partners. In the fall semester, students were placed into random teams and given the challenge of reducing loneliness in youths.

The Challenge

Hard Deadline: We were given 12 weeks to conduct research, narrow down the scope of our project, and present a solution or intervention to Fung Fellowship alumni and guest judges.

Vulnerable users: We decided to focus on unhoused an housing insecure youths because of the many challenges they face regarding loneliness. The challenge was that the youth would often not feel comfortable expressing their thoughts in interviews because of the sensitive nature of the topic.

The Process

Our team included two UX designers, a UX researcher, a mentor liaison, and a program manager. As the the sole UX researcher and a designer, I was responsible for leading the research process and working with our other UX designer to produce sketches, wireframes, mockups and a low-fidelity prototype. One of my team members had connections with a case manager working at an emergency shelter, so I interviewed the case manager and 5 youths staying at the shelter.

Research

User interviews

The purpose of these interviews were to gain deeper understanding into the experiences of case managers and the challenges and struggles the youths face regarding loneliness. I synthesized my interviews into 4 main insights:

Shelters don't feel safe

Shelters aren't places where the unhoused youth feel comfortable making friends because they don't trust the staff working at the shelter or the other clients in the shelter.

Shelters are temporary

The goal of being in the shelters is not to build community and put down roots.

Resources are hard to obtain

Mental health resources and support are only available to those who stay in the shelter for a specific number of days.

Social interactions help

Having someone to talk to and knowing that there are people that care about them make the youth feel less lonely.

Competitive Analysis

The competitive analysis gave us an insight into what existing resources were available to support unhoused and housing insecure youth.

Problem statement

How might we reduce loneliness in unhoused and housing insecure youth?

User Persona

My co-UX designer created a persona using my research findings.

Ideation

With all our research findings, we started brainstorming potenial ideas for our question. We created clusters of similar solutions and voted on what we were most interested in creating and what would be feasible.

Final solution

Our final solution was Chosen Family, a program and an app that would connect unhoused and housing insecure with community members that are interested in mentoring the youths and building connections with them. The key features are:

Personalizable experience

Youths can choose from a variety of experiences, such as educational support, career support, or community involvement.

Trust and safety

Case managers oversee any message exchanged between the youths and community members to ensure safety.

Complement, not compete

Chosen Family aims to complement existing resources by creating a holistic support system for unhoused youth.

Community support

Youths can be involved in their community and build a support system outside of the shelter.

Wireframes

The rough draft of our solutions showcases different user flows for mentors, case managers, and youth.

Prototype

A clickable low-fidelity prototype was built using Figma. It serves to be used in usability testing sessions with youths, mentors, and case managers.

Youth user flow

Mentor user flow

Case manager user flow

Next steps

Usability testing: Usability testing is needed to determine whether users find the app intuitive and easy to use.

Meetings with potential mentors: We want to meet with community members who would be interested as mentors to further refine this program.

High-fidelity prototype: Following successful usability testing sessions, we plan on refining our prototype and designing a high-fidelity prototype to hand-off to developers.

Measure and Iterate: We want to track whether unhoused or housing insecure youths feel less lonely after using our app to see what impact was made.