UX
USER RESEARCH // PROTOTYPE DESIGN // DAILY CONNECTION RITUAL
Connecting Through a Daily Activity: Word Up
A daily-word app that helps long-distance friends and family answer one small question: how was your day?
01 / CONTEXT
Word Up is a mobile app for friends and family who live far apart. Every day the group gets the same word. Each person shares how it showed up in their day with a sentence, a photo or a song, and everyone's answers are revealed together at the end of the day.
02 / CHALLENGE
"How was your day?" gets harder to answer the longer you wait. When it turns into how was your week, your month, your year, there is too much to cover, so the answer becomes "it was good." We asked: how might we connect long-distance groups through convenient, frequent and emotionally impactful interactions?
03 / PROCESS
We looked at how people already keep up with each other and scored each option on convenience, frequency and emotional impact. Prompt books are frequent and meaningful, but not convenient. Spotify Wrapped is effortless and personal, but it only happens once a year. A phone call carries the most emotional weight, but it takes planning, so it happens rarely. None of them covered all three.
04 / EVIDENCE
We tested the prototype over several rounds and changed it after each one. Testers said they would use it with friends back home and with family, and pointed to the streak as a reason to come back every day. It resonated most with three groups: people who like word games and vocabulary, people drawn to a small daily dose of learning, and people looking for reflection and mindfulness.
05 / Solution
One word a day, answered together. Each part of the app answers one criterion. Today puts the word on the lock screen, so there is nothing to plan or remember (convenience). Calendar records each day the group shows up, with a streak that keeps the habit going (frequency). Dictionary collects the group's words and the photo, text and song responses attached to them (emotional impact).
06 / REFLECTION
Testers reacted most strongly when the word connected to something the group had lived through together, so the next step is personalization: words chosen around a group's history, inside jokes and milestones. The project came back to one idea: maybe even just a little, everyone wants to be asked, and to answer, how was your day?