Love That Learns and Grows
A virtual pet-raising mobile app that supports couples in building stronger bonds through a fun, shared experience
Type
Gamification / Playful Design
Mental Health / Wellness
Behavior Change Design
Date
Jan - April 2023
(4 months)
About
Grow Along is designed to help couples communicate and work together more effectively by creating a fun and engaging experience that they can share. The app uses the concept of virtual pet-raising to create a common goal that couples can work towards, providing a sense of unity and fulfillment. This project is my capstone for the CSUEB Interaction Design graduate program.
My Role
As the project lead in a team of three, I:
Uncovered couples’ needs and pain points via user and expert interviews
Conducted Wizard of Oz usability testing to validate the concept
Designed visuals, created illustrations, and developed final interactive prototypes
Relationships have many stages and nuances. Some couples experience a breakdown in communication that can lead to a dull and monotonous relationship. Study shows that lacking common goals often leads to relationship dissatisfaction, as well as a decline in connection and excitement.
We conducted a mixed-methods study. This included
a survey with 24 participants
user interviews with 7 individuals (ages 20–35; 5 heterosexual, 1 homosexual)
subject matter experts interviews with two marriage and family therapists
desk research including: The 5 Love Languages (1992), Attached (2010), We're Not Really Strangers - Coupes Edition (2020).
Working towards a common goal
Sharing life goals and values helps couples build a strong, united foundation. It supports long-term commitment and keeps partners aligned in their journey together.
Surprise and Excitement
Over time, many couples feel things become stagnant. Couples believe rekindling romance and bringing in surprises could reignite the excitement and passion about their partners and relationships.
Treat your relationship like business
Therapists suggested treating relationships like partnerships—with regular check-ins and shared responsibilities—to maintain health, clarity, and commitment over time.
Communications and Quality Time
Couples enjoyed their relationships more when they spent quality time together—especially through deep conversations and shared activities —fostering joy, emotional safety, and mutual understanding.
How might we help couples improve communication and strengthen their relationships by working towards a shared goal?
02. Core Experience
Grow Along is a fun digital pet app that couples can raise together, aiding couples in discussing common relationship experiences. Unlike any other app in the market, our app focuses on the aspect of a meaningful shared goal to bring couples closer. Couples work together to raise a unique virtual pet - a raccoon for example, which is uncommon in real life. Both of them need to take care of it by completing small daily couples activities such as exchanging love quotes, gifting love coupons, and answering trivia questions. This leads them to reflect on their relationships and encourages more communication. In Grow Along, couples can connect in a whole new way, strengthening their bond, improving communication, and ultimately reigniting the spark.
Pet sketches and initial explorations
Universal Game Rule
Flexible Input Options
Users can choose pre-written or custom love quotes and coupons—both count equally. This minimizes effort while supporting personalization and accessibility.
Unlock With Action
Users must complete their own task to reveal their partner’s response, creating anticipation. This motivates consistent engagement and behavior change through curiosity.
Balance Over Perfection
Perfect equality (50/50) isn’t required or necessary, but large imbalances (10/90) will show in the pet’s health ,which encourages couples to grow together at their own pace.
Raise a Pet To Grow Your Love
03. Prototypes
Words of Affirmation & Communication
This feature allows partners to send each other affectionate messages in the form of love quotes. Each quote earns a point toward the pet’s health, symbolizing how verbal affirmation nourishes a relationship—just as food and water sustain a pet. As verbal communication is a fundamental need in a relationship, the goal is to encourage couples to express appreciation and make each other feel seen and valued.
Acts of Services & Quality Time
Love Coupon is a feature that lets users send thoughtful offers—like giving a massage or cooking dinner—to their partner. Gifting a coupon expresses appreciation, commitment, and a desire to spend quality time. Since quality time is key to a happy relationship, each coupon strengthens connection and increases the virtual pet’s happiness.
Emotional Intimacy & Personal Sharing
Trivia Questions is a feature that lets partners answer daily prompts together, creating a fun, reflective way to deepen their bond and grow their pet. Inspired by We're Not Really Strangers – Couples Edition, this feature is designed to spark meaningful conversations, strengthen emotional intimacy, and encourage personal sharing—key elements of long-term relationship health.
Commitment & Shared Goals
Grow Along’s onboarding is designed as a two-stage process—one for each partner—to support asynchronous participation and shared commitment. It includes three key steps: creating an account, connecting with a partner, and co-creating a pet. This structured approach transforms onboarding into a meaningful relationship ritual, setting a commitment for a shared journey.
Collaboration & Reflections
The Pet’s Health/Summary section shows each partner’s activity and the couple’s overall progress in health, happiness, and bond. This promotes transparency, encourages reflection, and supports balanced effort—helping couples grow together through shared insight, not pressure.
04. Iteration, Testing, and Validation
We conducted four rounds of user testing collecting qualitative data to better understand user needs and validate our design decisions. This involves testing user experience as well as the usability of the app.
What we validated, what we rethought
Validated Concepts
Trivia strengthens bonds and spark conversation
Testing trivia questions with couples confirmed that playful, reflective prompts could spark deeper conversations and emotional closeness, which enhanced relationship quality.
Love-based activities drive engagement
In the round 3 test, couples found the prompts and pet interactions emotionally motivating and the shared activities fun, validating the emotional appeal of the app.
Asynchronous collaboration preferred
The test also confirmed that asynchronous collaboration—allowing partners to participate on their own time—felt natural and worked well for both long-distance and co-located couples.
Iteration Triggers
Overwhelming home screen
In the round 2 test, the lo-fi sketch showed high cognitive load on the home screen due to too many metrics and unclear next steps. Users want to focus on a clear visual hierarchy and one task at a time.
Unclear activity structure
Some users didn’t realize they were limited to one activity per day, which impacted their motivation. They preferred clarified game rules and progress indicators to set expectations and drive engagement.
Need for onboarding context
Not all users were familiar with concepts like “love coupons.” First-time users would like to see background context and examples to reduce confusion.
Grow Along was designed in 2023—right before AI took over everything. If we were building it today, there’s a lot we’d love to enhance:
Limited voices, half the story: Most participants were heterosexual—and we only heard from one partner per couple. Next time, we’d love to involve both partners and a more diverse range of voices.
Therapy-inspired, scope-limited: We explored love languages and change models, but had to pause on things like attachment styles and therapist input—leaving room for future features.
Short-term tests for a long-term app: Relationships don’t grow overnight. We validated the concept via testing in a week, but would love to track long-term behavior and bonding.
Handmade Magic: I don't always need fancy tools to test great ideas. Our low-tech prototypes—like trivia via Excel and a Wizard-of-Oz chatbot—let us validate ideas without crafting in Figma or writing a single line of code.
As we enter the AI era: We’d explore personalized activity prompts, smart tone-sensing for emotional feedback, and adaptive pet behavior based on each couple’s vibe - a pet growing with your relationship, intelligently.
