Kin is an app designed to help users maintain strong connections with their loved ones, even across long distances. By offering a platform for planning and participating in collaborative activities, Kin helps couples, friends, and family members create shared experiences despite physical separation.

Kin

Figma

TOOLS

ROLE

Designer

TIMELINE

February - March 2025

User Research

SKILLS

Wireframing

Prototyping

Usability Testing

● THE CHALLENGE

Maintaining connection across distance

Long-distance relationships often face the difficulty of staying emotionally connected due to a lack of new shared experiences. With busy schedules and physical separation, couples, friends, and family members struggle to find meaningful ways to engage, leading to feelings of disconnection. Kin addresses this challenge by offering a collaborative platform for planning activities that bring loved ones together, no matter the distance.

● SOLUTION SNAPSHOT

Foster lasting connections with collaborative activities on Kin

Understanding the common challenge of feeling disconnected from loved ones due to distance, my team and I developed Kin to bridge that gap. We know how difficult it can be to maintain closeness when shared experiences are hard to come by. That’s why we created Kin—empowering users to plan and enjoy meaningful activities together, strengthening emotional bonds despite the miles that separate them.

Easily pick and plan activities together with your loved ones, even from afar. Kin allows you to collaborate on choosing meaningful experiences, ensuring everyone’s input is valued in creating memorable moments.

Collaborative activity planning

Activity invites and details at a glance

Stay organized and excited with clear invites and all the details in one place. Kin lets you refer back to your planned activities, keeping the anticipation high as you look forward to your next shared experience.

With Kin, you can plan and collaborate on activities with loved ones, track shared experiences, and strengthen your connections—one meaningful moment at a time.

Now, let’s explore the process—how did we develop our solution?

● OUR RESEARCH

Understanding real connection challenges

We began this process by conducting user interviews with individuals in long-distance relationships, friendships, and family dynamics to understand their biggest challenges. By gathering firsthand insights, we explored how distance affects connection, the struggles of planning shared activities, and the impact of mismatched schedules.

We created an affinity map in which we organized our notes and quotes from our user interviews into different common feelings and themes that we found.

Our research led us to a few main themes:

1. Long-distance relationships can feel stagnant without shared experiences.

Without new shared experiences, conversations can become repetitive, making it harder to feel emotionally connected. Users expressed that meaningful interactions often stem from doing things together, but physical separation limits these opportunities.

2. Scheduling conflicts make spontaneity difficult.

Time differences and busy schedules prevent long-distance couples and friends from being spontaneous, often making it hard to find time for quality interactions.

3. Meaningful conversations are essential for connection.

Many users shared that texting alone often feels insufficient for maintaining deep emotional bonds. Real-time interactions, like FaceTiming or engaging in a shared activity, help strengthen relationships.

I am somebody who had to move far away from my loved ones. I am trying to navigate long-distance relationships with my family members, friends, and partner, but the physical distance and our busy schedules make it difficult to create new shared experiences, which makes me feel emotionally distant and disconnected.

This led us to our problem statement:

1. How might we help people in long-distance relationships create shared experiences that feel meaningful and natural?

2. How might we encourage two parties in a long-distance relationship to make time for each other amidst busy and conflicting schedules?

With this in mind, we asked ourselves:

To translate our research insights into actionable design solutions, my team and I kicked off the ideation phase with a Crazy 8s brainstorming session. We rapidly sketched ideas, grouped similar concepts, and voted on the most promising ones. Some early ideas included a “build-a-date” activity planner, shared images, daily image updates, everyday quizzes, growing a virtual plant together, and guided conversations.

From research to solution

● IDEATION AND BRAINSTORMING

Additional ideas, such as daily image updates, everyday quizzes, growing a virtual plant together, and guided conversations, were exciting but placed outside the scope of this project for future consideration.

With our key features identified, each team member created individual wireframes to visualize potential user flows. This process allowed us to explore different layouts and interactions deciding on a final design direction. We presented our designs, discussed usability considerations, and refined the flow and structure to ensure clarity and accessibility.

Wireframing

We each created wireframes based on our user flows and our key features.

While we loved the idea of integrating habit-forming features like daily interactions, we decided to focus on two core features for this project:

🤝 Collaborative Activity Planning

A "build-a-date" style feature that lets users co-create and schedule activities together.

📓 Scrapbook Memories

A shared space where users can upload images and document their experiences.

● DESIGNING KIN

Before refining Kin’s design system, we focused on creating an experience that felt warm, inviting, and seamless for long-distance loved ones. Our initial designs centered around intuitive collaboration—making it easy to plan activities, share moments, and stay connected despite physical distance. With these core ideas in place, we turned our attention to refining the visual language to further enhance the sense of closeness and ease of use.

Visualizing Kin

To evoke warmth and connection, we chose orange for energy and closeness, balanced with blue for trust and calmness.

Using DM Sans and rounded UI elements, we aimed to create a friendly and inviting experience.

Visual design

After establishing a design system, we decided to utilize our wireframes to create our first round of hi-fidelity designs for our app.

Hi-Fidelity screens (part 1)

Selecting a friend

Choosing an activity

Scheduling time

Given the time constraints of our project, we decided to primarily refine the app flow of scheduling and planning a task collaboratively with the user’s connection. We still had many discussions regarding other features such as the scrapbook and what the app could look like in the future, which will be discussed later in this case study.

Upon finishing our first round of hi-fi designs, there were still some more changes we had to make with consistency throughout our design, since we had made these designs separately. That prompted another discussion about how we envisioned our user and app flow to look like.

● USABILITY TESTING

Testing our prototype with real users

We wanted to test whether the act of planning an activity together is effective and practical for strengthening long-distance relationships, and the extent to which our app helps facilitate this. Our testing process consisted of our users walking through activity planning tasks that we had given to them, sharing their thoughts, then answering general interview questions.

We combined all of our findings into sticky notes and did affinity mapping again to group similar themes/sentiments.

We found that generally, participants felt that planning activities together was a fun way to bond with their loved ones:

Planning together adds a layer of intentionality, making the experience feel more meaningful and collaborative, which aligns with participants finding the process itself rewarding.

“A call to plan it out adds more thought to the activity, so I think it makes it a bit more special... a bit more collaborative.”

“When me and Nana are talking on the phone and trying to plan something, she’s always like ‘oh no, I can’t do it at this time, I’m going to the symphony.’ So I think even just picking a time brings up conversation as well.”

Coordinating schedules naturally sparks conversation, reinforcing the idea that the planning process itself helps strengthen connections.

● PROTOTYPE

After completing usability testing, I synthesized the feedback to refine the final hi-fi screens and prototype. We also ensured that our designs were more consistent by aligning typography, spacing, and component styling across all screens. This increased the app’s cohesion, improving both the app’s aesthetics and usability. Additionally, we refined interaction patterns to maintain uniformity, making the experience feel more polished and intuitive.

Finalizing our designs

Selecting a friend

Scheduling a time

Activity overview

Key improvements

01. Consistency

We made our designs more consistent via the design system, utilizing the same spacing, typography, colors, and style as we agreed upon for our app designs.

02. User flow

In order to create an easier user flow for scheduling the app, we ensured that we had all of the steps needed to ensure clarity and ease of use when utilizing the app (e.g. creating/deleting tasks, previewing overview, checking off tasks, etc.).

03. Improving connection

One of our interview insights was that people wanted to bridge connection with their loved ones. One of the ways we wanted to further improve this was to add quick, easy reminder/notification options once they were finished planning an event.

Click here to view our prototype!

● FUTURE OPPORTUNITIES AND REFLECTIONS

My reflections

This project was an incredibly rewarding experience, made even more meaningful by the collaboration with my amazing team. With the support of our mentors, we were able to bring a thoughtful and impactful solution to life. It was inspiring to see how our concept resonated with participants, validating the importance of creating tools that foster connection and shared experiences.

While the current version of Kin addresses the core need for collaborative activity planning, there are several exciting opportunities for future iterations:

Where I’d love to see Kin go:

  • Scrapbook Feature: We considered adding a scrapbook feature, allowing users to log and revisit memories of past activities. Although we couldn’t implement it in time for testing, many participants expressed enthusiasm for this idea.

  • Group Activity Planning: Some participants expressed interest in planning activities with multiple friends, not just one-on-one. I think that expanding Kin to support group collaboration could broaden its appeal and usability.

  • Dating App Integration: We’re curious to explore how Kin could be applied to early-stage relationships. Integrating with dating apps could help new connections bond over shared activities, making interactions more engaging and memorable.

  • Communication Strategies: To promote healthier and more effective interactions, we could introduce prompts notifications while users are completing the activity if enabled in order to facilitate more meaningful conversations and communication.

    Gamification and Rewards: Incorporating gamified elements (e.g., badges, streaks, or activity milestones) could incentivize ongoing engagement and make the experience more playful and rewarding.

    Accessibility: In future iterations, I want to focus more on accessibility by refining color contrast, adding text-to-speech compatibility, dark mode, and ensuring all interactive elements are easily navigable by screen readers. This would make Kin more inclusive for a wider range of users.