Children undergo substantial growth in their early years, especially in terms of emotional development. However, parents can't be with their kids all the time, and the absence of a parent in their childhood years may cause children to develop feelings of neglect and resentment.

For parents constantly travelling for work, this means that they frequently become lonely, and have a greater need for consistent communication with their loved ones.

For nine decades, LEGO has engaged children with the bricks to express themselves, and have allowed for opportunities to bond with their parents, fostering their early childhood development.

Since the '90s, LEGO had been interweaving the physical and digital, and their expertise in this domain can be leveraged to help support children's growth by keeping families connected despite physical distances.

For qualitative research, I helped recruit interviewees, designed interview questions, and recorded data during user tests. I also designed survey forms and questions, and posted them to social media platforms such as Facebook and Reddit to gather quantitative data.

From the results of our qualitative and quantitative research, I helped analyze and summarize the data to identify the following insights: story telling inspires creation, distance prevents quality play, and toys evoke emotional expression. These findings lead us to our frame:

Using our research to create parent and child personas, we realized that to best support our target audience, our solution should be fun, engaging, and capable of aiding children's emotional development and their still-developing communication skills.

By mapping out the experience for both father and daughter, we found that children's developing vocabulary complicates communication. We decided to facilitate communication in the interaction phase to ensure that parents can continue making meaningful impact on their children's development.

With our target audience and point of intervention determined, our team came up with three core principles that every aspect of our solution should embody: Adventurous Play, Encouraging Guidance, and Balanced Involvement.

With the guiding principles in place, our team then focused on refining our concept's visuals. I was responsible for designing UI components, such as buttons, and screens like the login and story selection interface, as well as specifying their interactions. These were done using Figma.

I also assisted with writing copy for the application and project presentation slides. Adobe Xd was used to prototype and animate our application concept.