Junxiang Lu
I'm a UX & Service Designer blending research, strategy, and design to craft seamless experiences across digital and physical touchpoints. Driven by curiosity, collaboration, and systems thinking. Nice to meet you.
I'm a UX & Service Designer blending research, strategy, and design to craft seamless experiences across digital and physical touchpoints. Driven by curiosity, collaboration, and systems thinking. Nice to meet you.
Bond is a service for child-free middle-aged individuals who struggle with establishing connection with like-minded people in an unfamiliar city. Empowered by users’ experience of nostalgia, Bond helps users start a conversation in an easier way.
Middle-aged people, at this stage of life, encounter more challenges than ever before and often experience the lowest levels of happiness, as the growing weight of responsibilities brings increasing pressure. Reducing a middle-aged individual’s loneliness is vital for maintaining long-term health and well-being.
So how do we reduce the loneliness for this group?
The chosen leverage point is nostalgia as it is a sentimental longing for the past and its collective memories of the same aged people, making it easy for them to start a genuine conversation.
In this stage, few methods were conducted to gain a greater understanding on how they spend their free time and how they feel about their current life stage.
These included semi-structured interviews, card sorting, artefact analysis with participants. With their pain point, iceberg methods and crazy 8 helped me extract key insights.
Group round robin and frantic 5 were used in extracting feasible design directions from HMW.
This process helped us to work together as a team, gain different ways of thinking and think through the solution from multiple perspectives. This practice gave a direction for prototype design.
Using the insights generated from the previous stage, the solution was developed through multiple rounds of prototyping and afterward iterations:
During the development of the refined idea, prototypes were continuously employed to iterate and optimise the concept, while further clarifying the target user group. The selected concept was validated through successive stages of prototyping, moving from paper-based sketches to low-fidelity and ultimately high-fidelity designs. This iterative process not only enabled the filtering and refinement of ideas but also ensured that the service evolved in response to user needs, aligning the final solution with both usability and contextual relevance.
Bond focuses on three vital functions: be connected, social network and exquisite events. By offering nostalgia-based events, we provide users a safe and familiar place to connect, share and make friends with like-minded people. Below are the main features:
• Connect with nearby people, foster new friendships, invite them to events, and encourage to sustain connections.
• Social network to discover nearby people who share similar interests and experiences.
• Exquisite events rooted in nostalgic experiences, providing users with opportunities to connect, reminisce, and engage meaningfully.
On a small scale, the platform helps users rediscover hobbies, build connections, gain support and belonging, and reignite passion for life.
Looking at a bigger view, Bond service connects with local community and council, revitalising communities and local economies, and builds a sustainable social support model.
Bond collaborates with local partners to shape its service as a form of social infrastructure, while working with UK institutions to build a service network for the wider public.
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Team & Project Leader Intern: Tao Zhiran Ceramic Culture & Creative Co., China — Jun 2023 ~ July 2023
Best Commercial: Siila team – UXathon 2024
Visual Designer Intern: Sichuan Sanzheng Baiye Technology Co., China— Mar 2024 ~ Jun 2024