Team LABS

Background

Have you ever told yourself that you would call your mom after work and then forgot to act on it once work was over? Or how about that time you said you’d check up on your best friend once you finished running your errands, but it slipped out of your mind until you were occupied with something else?

Well, it turns out you’re not alone. 66% of our survey participants reported remembering while being “too busy” to reach out to their loved ones. Over 90% of our participants are not fully satisfied with their habits of slacking off connecting with their loved ones, with an astonishing influx of over 65% of our responses denoting “I could do more” or “I could do better” (in their own words).

What makes these results even more concerning, is how much our participants’ loved ones mean to them. Over 90% of our participants share that remaining in close contact with their loved ones virtually is of high importance to them. Our interviewees all share the same sentiment when asked how they feel after connecting with their loved ones: “so happy”.

Pain Points

So, what are our users doing to combat their bad habits? An interviewee told us he “just remembered” to keep in touch with his loved ones. How did that work out for him? 

“Last week, I was supposed to call my friend since he wanted to know more about my new position. I told him I’d call him over the weekend and completely forgot.”

Another interviewee shared that “Sometimes, I have to write it on my iPhone reminders like ‘call a friend’, ‘wash your car’..”. What was the problem with that? “It can start to feel like a chore.”

Our participants shared a theme of pain points:

1. They’re too forgetful. Life gets in the way that the thought vanishes and seems to appear when they can’t act on it.

2. Particularly for our busy users, putting “call X” on their reminders doesn’t work out for them too well because it is encompassed by a swarm of mundane, routine tasks.  

‍

Landing on the solution 

After learning that our users prioritize connecting with ~5 people on a regular basis, we understood that our busy users cannot accommodate the breadth of connecting with all their friends and family on social media; they wanted to laser-focus on connecting with those that are dearest to their hearts and of utmost importance to them. Moreover, we learned that their go-to methods of communication with their preferred people is via messaging, phone, and video calling. Therefore, we knew our solution couldn’t live anywhere besides on the phones of our users.

Of course, an integral building block that was factored into our solution was how forgetful our users were, denoting that they only seem to remember when they’re busy. We made sure to tip-toe around our busy users, meaning that we did not want to overwhelm them on their already-hectic lives. We did that through our designer (Lois)’s selection of soothing colors and simple interface; and enabling the choice to customize reaching out to their loved ones as they found fit with their own schedules.

Last, but certainly not least, we waded into our users’ verbal and written responses, and noticed that users flipped the sentiment switch – from the guilt and laziness to the warmth and happiness – when the conversation flipped from digging into their bad habits to learning how they felt after connecting with their favorite people. That’s when the light bulb struck – we learned that our users were not thinking of these fulfilling emotions they attain post-connecting due to their packed and routinely schedules.

Explanation of solution 

The solution you’ve been *impatiently* waiting for.. Introducing, Momento!

We onboard you into our app with one simple screen: “What motivates you to connect with your loved ones?”. That gets the mushy thought process initiated, and we store those answers for later use. We provide the focus that users need to maintain healthy relationships through enabling them to import their top 5 favorite contacts straight from their phone.

Once imported, they can customize their contact(s) and contact them straight from the app. To assist our users in maintaining their relationships, our core feature is the “Reminders” page. To use it, you would need to have at least one favorite contact imported, and you can set up your own time to be reminded to reach out to your loved ones.

We provide the flexibility of selecting the time & day(s) of the week to send out that reminder, so that it doesn’t conflict with our users’ busy schedules anymore and to mitigate piling it up with tasks that can swallow the emotional value out of sending that text to your loved one. A key field before submitting your reminder is to select how talking to that favorite contact makes you feel. We incorporate those happy feelings as positive affirmation into our reminders, along with the motivators selected in the onboarding process, so that our users’ motivators are positive (not guilt and longing) when they get that reminder to talk to their favorite contact.

Designs

Landing on an MVP was not as easy as it read. We needed to conduct several rounds of user research & testing and diving deep into our users’ responses and underlying motivators.  

Below is how our lo-fi designs looked:

 Through user testing, we learned that -

1. The toggle between the two pages in the “Reminders” page was not so obvious.
2. Users struggled to connect the actual reminder with the “Feels” (positive affirmation). They were unsure of the purpose of the second page and how it connects to the reminders.
   

Between our first lo-fi and last hi-fi designs, we had at least 5 rounds of changes applied - from changing the layout of our bubble select because we noticed our users move their heads trying to read some of the text; all the way to integrating our “Feels” feature into our “Reminders” for simplicity - we landed on our final hi-fi MVP: