Halo is an intelligent personal assistant (IPA) and app, made to help facilitate healthy conversation about grievances (such as a death in the family, divorce, or financial limitations) between a young child (aged 4 to 9) and a parent.
Halo’s goal is to teach parents how to have those difficult conversations, facilitate them by creating a safe space for both the parents and children and, help parents explain the grievances to children in a way that they will understand.
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For this project I took on the role of project manager and visual designer.
Teammates: Varun Khatri, Tori Tryon, Liam Stoica
This project was created for my Human Factors class and completed in a 10 week deisgn sprint following teh double diamind framework.
Halo began with a brief, "Communication" was going to be the theme for the class that quarter. Our group quickly decides that we wanted to focus on "Tough Family Conversations" based on the types of conversation we had or wished we had with our own families.
We talked with child psychologists who specialized in family consulting, divorce, and foster care to learn what young children can and cannot understand. Along with some common pitfalls of parents dealing with grievances. Adults who had experienced childhood trauma were interviewed to learn what their thought process was as a child and they felt neglected.
Finalize concepts and iterate designs. Through several rounds of user testing, card sorting, and feedback from peers, we transitioned our Lo Fi prototype into Mid Fi, and then into a Hi Fi functional mobile platform.
Halo is an intelligent personal assistant (IPA) to help facilitate healthy conversation about grievances (such as a death in the family, divorce, or financial limitations) between a young child (aged 4 to 9) and a parent.
Physical Product
The physical appearance of Halo is a large ring with two handles that when both gripped, becomes activated.
Voice Assistant: a mediator in conversations, it will have a machine-learning voice assistant system with a very kind and friendly persona that is designed to be comforting to the children.
Companion App: For the parents in which they may schedule conversations, stories in which Halo can read to help ease into the tough conversations and also to choose games and activities to play with their child.
Games & Fables: Halo can also be used to play games and ready fun stories. This is used to build trust with the children and ensure that Halo does not have a negative association n their mind.
