generate
Bridging intergenerational families with nudge-able photo-sharing
role
Software Designer
duration
Jan – April 2025
organization
generate
mobile app product development
dearly
Context
Dearly is a private social platform that helps users stay connected across generations. Designed with accessibility in mind, it caters to users across a range of technological experience. Dearly offers two distinct user modes: a simplified basic interface and a feature-rich advanced interface.
Our client
Our client, Caroline Xiong, is a fifth-year student at Northeastern University studying Business Administration & Design with a concentration in Marketing Analytics and Interaction Design. With a passion for blending user-centered design with meaningful solutions, Caroline developed Dearly, a family-focused platform that enhances connection, accessibility, and engagement across diverse users.
Inspired by the challenges intergenerational families face in maintaining meaningful relationships, Dearly was designed to bridge the technological divide between younger and older family members. The app evokes emotions of warmth, belonging, and shared joy, offering features that allow users to share heartfelt moments and create new memories, no matter the distance or level of technological illiteracy.
Caroline envisions success stories like grandparents feeling more involved in their grandchildren's lives or busy young adults finding easy, consistent ways to connect with their families, and our team wanted to bring this envisioned success story to life.
Springing off of Caroline's existing project materials, our design team initiated our first deliverables of sitemapping our basic and advanced screens.
We then dove into creating user flows specifically on our focuses, conversing weekly with our engineers to allow them to build out the backend programming behind our features. This would allow them to seamlessly connect the front-end and back-end once we finished building our hi-fidelity screens.
Creating the lo-fis for basic and advanced homepages for each step in our userflows.
After many rounds of lo-fi and hi-fi iterations, I finalized my screens for the Homepage. We each created prototypes for our engineers to visualize how our app would animate with each step. I focused on building reusable, customizable components that would allow me to build a prototype with less screens and instead, more component sets allowing for easy variation and updating.
Even after development and deployment finished, we still weren't done. The last step was finally presenting our hard work at the Generate 2025 showcase!