Robots Aren’t Taking Over the World (Yet)… Instead, They are Improving Relationships
By Katelyn Mei, Yerim Heo, Hawa Drammeh, Pu Thavikulwat
Relationships are associated with better health, longer life, reduced stress, discovery of oneself, and overall happiness, if done right. People in relationships want to be seen, heard, and understood by their partner. The crux of a successful & sustainable relationship involves one showing active care for their partner, and open & healthy communication accompanied by a willingness to work through conflicts as they emerge.
Problem and Solution Overview
Poor communication is one of the most common problems among people in romantic relationships. It can lead to misunderstandings, conflicts, and frustrations that may affect the sustainability of one’s relationship.
Poor communication can manifest in different ways:
- One may feel that their partner is uninterested in them and/or does not feel cared for when the other does not check up on them.
- When conflicts arise between couples, both partners might not respond in a healthy way such as shutting down in a conversation. Unhealthy responses can escalate conflicts and leave the root of conflicts unaddressed, which can be harmful to relationships in the long term.
User Research
Before designing a solution, we hoped to understand how miscommunication arises in couples’ daily interactions and a user-centered research process was necessary.
In searching for participants, we focused on people who were currently or previously in monogamous relationships aged 18–30.
→ Research Methodology
We decided on self-reporting for both research methods because romantic relationships are usually very intimate ones, and any sort of observational method would most likely be awkward, and change the way the participants usually interact with each other. Keeping these factors in mind, we chose the following approaches:
- Interview: it gives the interviewee space to talk about details and for the interviewer to go off-script if something interesting comes up.
- Survey: it can offer a bit of privacy and anonymity.
We distributed our survey to classmates, as well as in our University subreddit r/udub, which currently consists of 37.1k members. Our online survey consisted of 20 questions, and our interviews followed a similar set of questions.
→ Questions of interest
Our goal was to get a more holistic view of the background of our users. We recorded things such as demographics, relationship status, love languages, information about prior conflicts, how users normally resolved conflicts, and exploratory questions as to what users think could help them out! We wanted to not only learn the challenges our users face, but also the positive things that they have seen work out for them in the past and present.
We garnered a total of 100 survey responses and completed six user interviews, which have provided us with more contexts and details into couples’ interactions.
→ Design Research Results and Themes
During our user research, it has become evident that each relationship has its fulfilling moments and upsetting days as well as mundane little things. Its sustainability requires effort and intentionality.
Reading our users’ descriptions of conflicts, something caught our attention:
- people care while forgetting the expressive ways to care in the relationship;
- people shut down while not recognizing the impact of silence in conflicts.
Most users do want to make their partners feel understood, communicate better, and do want to build better habits to resolve conflicts. It just may not always be evident on how to go about achieving this.
With these challenges in mind…
Our product aims to create a simple and interactive way to combat these challenges.
- Allowing users to directly and conveniently check in on each other in real time. This will enable users to feel cared for by their partner in an interactive manner.
- Providing users a simple, nonverbal way to indicate their feelings and needs to their partner during conflicts or difficult moments for individuals.
While our goal is not to encourage the maximum engagement with our design when it comes to relationships, we hope our design can be integrated into one’s everyday life easily and interestingly by choice. We recognize the difficulty of expressing care and emotions for individuals and how it impacts their relationships.
Proposed Design
We came up with the “Little Robot” idea, which allows couples to update on each other in real-time with emotions and messages from far away. Our idea is for the robot to have a simple interface with a facial recognition camera, a microphone, and touch recognition, while also being paired to an app on your phone. They are best suited for long-distance partners. Although, however cute they may be, they should not be a replacement for in-person communication.
The Little Robot essentially substitutes the user’s partner when they are not together. In particular, it promotes the user and their couple to “check-in” with each other throughout their day by sending updates of their current mood through the robot, with optional voice messages.
Sometimes, it can be hard to express upset or frustration clearly, especially when in an emotional state. It can feel easier to just ignore those feelings and push them down, or push the other person out. The Little Robot can serve as a conduit for conveying brief and simple messages and emotions to your partner where one of them gets upset by the other’s words and they use the robot to communicate for a little while apart or taking time alone.
While we wish we can be skillful at communication in romantic relationships, it takes time and effort as well as intentionality. As we all are on the journey of learning to build sustainable relationships, we hope the Little Robot makes this process more approachable.
