Project Overview

Client: Kintact, a pre-seed ed-tech startup
Industry: SaaS, Edtech
Timeline: 12 weeks (2025)
My Role: Lead User Researcher and Product Designer

Kintact needed a simple way for modern families to stay emotionally connected. Existing tools were fragmented and impersonal, so I designed an MVP that brings memories, conversations, and relationships into one shared family space.

Design and Research Schema

Immigrant and first-generation students depend on family support, yet existing communication tools fail to bridge cultural, linguistic, and generational gaps, making it difficult for families to truly understand and support students’ academic and emotional lives despite frequent contact.

• Interviews and Suveys to Identify pain points

• Identify main features to address pain points

• Create wireframe to test feature viability with development team

• Design High-fidelity prototypes

I designed surveys and interviews to:

• Surface informal, often invisible support systems provided by families (emotional reassurance, motivation, cultural grounding, advice).

• Understand communication rhythms.

• Reveal barriers to connection, including language, technology literacy, time zones, cultural expectations, and emotional hesitations.

• Examine how existing platforms are appropriated or constrained by family dynamics rather than designed for them.

• Identify unmet needs and design opportunities for tools that support cross-cultural understanding, care, and shared presence—not just messaging.

Interview Outcome

Identified Pain Points

Personas emerged from:

1. Frequency of patterns: These three groups appeared repeatedly across interviews

2. Distinct pain points: Each has unique challenges that can't be solved with one-size-fits-all

3. Conflicting needs: Students want filtering, parents want transparency - this tension is critical to design for

4. Adoption dynamics: The team needs all three personas to adopt together for the app to work - network effect

Key Finding: The parent-child dynamic reveals a fundamental tension: Parents want MORE connection and transparency, while students want selective sharing and flexibility. Students create a "filtered reality" to protect parents emotionally, which ironically increases parental anxiety. Any solution must address this asymmetry.

Problem Statement

How might we help immigrant and first-generation students and their families build shared understanding and support across cultural, linguistic, and generational gaps?

The MVP focuses on helping families see their relationships, share meaningful moments, and connect in safe, flexible ways.

Design Solution and Features

1. Family Profiles, Visual Map & Shared Memory Timeline
   Users create profiles that auto-generate a family tree and global map, with time-zone awareness. Personal memories (photos, stories, voice notes, videos) live on individual timelines but become shared threads when relatives are tagged, allowing families to collectively build and revisit moments over time.

2. “Get to Know Me” Daily Prompts
   Lightweight daily prompts encourage reflection and sharing through text, voice, or photos. Responding unlocks access to family responses, fostering mutual curiosity and deeper understanding rather than passive scrolling.

3. General Chat + Private Subgroups
   Families can communicate in a main chat or create smaller, private groups (e.g., cousins, siblings) to share content and conversations in spaces that feel safer, more relevant, and emotionally comfortable.

Together, these MVP features establish the foundation for shared understanding, emotional closeness, and culturally grounded connection across distance and generations.

Reflections

This app is in active development. The full experience will be revealed at launch on January 25, 2026.