The prompt presented to the attendants of the Rice Hackathon is to create an app that helps undergraduate students.

My Pod helps long-distance friends stay connected, no matter where they are. It provides fun prompts for sharing photos, texts, and voice messages, making it great for one-on-one or group chats. It also shows friends' mood statuses, encouraging deeper conversations.

Each team have a weekend to complete the assignment. The deliverables include a working prototype and a user case study.

We polled 70+ undergraduate students with a form asking them about their relationship with long distance friends.

College students struggle to maintain long-distance friendships because they are uncertain about how to reach out to those friends in meaningful ways and are not regularly informed on their friends’ lives.

College students report that busy schedules and diverging life paths reduce contact frequency with long-distance friends, and without regular reminders, they often don't realize these friendships are weakening.

Students feel they're growing apart from long-distance friends due to lack of shared daily experiences and the limitations of digital platforms that fail to sustain meaningful connections.

To the right are a series of sketches that my teammates and I drew during our brainstorming process.
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Here, we thought of the function of the app will be activity based.Our approach to activity prompts is personalized. We decided that prompts would be something decided by individuals rather than a universal prompt that every user receives. This way, being sent a prompt actually feels personal and people can take agency in their friendship journeys.

Welcome Page: Immediately prompting user to start an activity to incentive communication

Inbox: Icons to indicate what kind of activity the user and their friend(s) started

Friend page: Complies all activity and interactions into different media types

We personalized activity prompts by letting individuals choose what to send, making the experience feel personal and giving people agency in their friendships.

To avoid choice overload, we designed a step-by-step process where users choose a prompt category, select a specific prompt, pick a media type, and send it to friends.

Whales' long-distance migrations symbolize
how our app connects friendships across vast distances.
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1. Ideation
2. Writing and summarizing the user research
3. Brainstorming activities
4. Proposing different forms of responses
5. Branding and identity

I realized the importance of having a very well-thought out and planned hi-fi state, especially when collaborating with team members. We reviewed every interaction decision we made before ever thinking about the branding, which is not a work style I was used to.