Co-Imagine

Winter 2025

OVERVIEW

Inspired by my LLM research at the University of Michigan, Co-Imagination is an application designed to foster empathy through AI-powered narrative writing activities. Unlike traditional conversation-based therapy, Co-Imagination guides users to actively immerse in self-reflection and perspective exchange as a way to develop empathetic understanding of others and reduce social distances.

ROLE

UX Researcher, UX Designer

TEAM

Personal Project

DURATION

9 weeks, Winter 2025

Problem Discovery

The growing social conflicts stem from a lack of understanding of opposing perspectives.

According to the Pew Research Center:

90%

Americans sees strong conflicts between people who support different political parties

71%

Americans sees strong conflicts between people with different ethnic or racial backgrounds

Without opportunities to actively engage with and understand perspectives different from your own can further amplify disagreement and overlook opportunities for mutual understanding or connection.

How Might We encourage people to explore unknown perspectives beyond their own closed circle?

Our Solution

Unlock New Perspectives with Co-Imagine

Gamified Experience

Users earn empathy scores throughout their narrative writing to stay motivated and on track.
Helpful tips guide writing on word choice and imagination.
Badges are rewarded after completion to commemorate progress.

Narrative Log & Weekly Report

Narrative Transportation and AI Guidance

Narrative writing helps users reflect on unknown perspectives through first-person, scenario-based writing.
AI-generated prompts, characters, and Co-Imagine autocomplete narrative provide guidance and bridges imagination gaps.
AI insights and reports help track progress and boost motivation.

Supportive Community

A supportive, inclusive space for sharing ideas and publishing narratives.
Encourage meaningful interactions through perspective exchange, allowing users to share misunderstood perspectives and exchange with the community to foster mutual understanding.

Journal log saves past entries for users to review, reflect, and revise anytime.
Narrative Remix lets users rewrite past entires from different perspectives or a new prompt, promoting diverse empathy practice.
Weekly reports track narrative stats, goal completion, community engagement, and badge collections to keep users motivated and informed.

The Process

Research

To gain a deeper understanding of the problem, I conducted 5 interviews and distributed surveys to explore the barriers people face in empathy and perspective-taking. In researching potential solutions, I reviewed academic papers on narrative transportation and performed a competitive analysis of current AI-driven emotional support and journaling applications.

User Research

These initial interviews with 3 college students and 2 working adults help discover the problem space by identifying three key empathy barriers users commonly face.

Personal Disconnect

Environmental Factors

Lack of Guidance

and Awareness

The biggest theme discovered was that empathy isn't naturally developed in everyone and should be fostered through meaningful guidance and community support.

Synthesis

To better understand how to bridge the gap between perspectives in a supportive way, I started to synthesize findings by creating affinity maps, user personas, and gathering secondary research.

Affinity Diagram

User Personas

Based on user interview insights, the two user personas are created representing different empathy barriers—one struggling with personal empathy growth and social connection, while the other experiences empathy fatigue due to environmental influences.

Secondary Research

The Transportation Model

My secondary research on the narrative transportation model suggests that when individuals mentally immerse themselves in a story, it can significantly shift their thoughts and behaviors. Especially when the narrative is reflective and from a first-person perspective, shared human experiences with a character help individuals to empathize and bridge differences.

Brainstorm solutions

With a basic understanding of users, the problem space, and psychological methods, I began brainstorming potential solutions. Some key ideas include narrative writing, integrating AI guidance, community support, and gamified experiences.

Competitive Analysis

Based on these brainstormed solutions, I wanted to further investigate the current use of AI and narrative reflection in mental health therapy, self-reflection, and journaling apps. I explored various AI implementations across the apps, including conversational chatbots, narrative support, and progress tracking, and completed a competitive analysis to better understand how to utilize AI and narrative as main features.

By comparing different AI integrations, I found that while AI chatbots can be effective in some scenarios, they may disrupt the immersive experience users needed for deep self-reflection and empathy-building.

Approaching a Solution

To address the issues of AI interruptions and over-reliance, I designed a solution where users take active autonomy in narratives to ensure immersion in reflection, while AI provides unobtrusive guidance to bridge perspective and imagination gaps.

To overcome other empathy barriers identified earlier, the solution also incorporates gamified features to encourage continuous exploration and community aspects to ensure a supportive environment.

Design Process

System Architecture

Wireframes

Dashboard/Narrative Writing

Explore/ Log/ Progress/ Community

Design Iterations

The main design iterations focused on the narrative user flow:

Added more color contrast to improve readability and create a clearer hierarchy.
Expanded key sections to fit the screen, reducing distractions and improving navigation.
Maximized writing space and reduced character and prompt sections, while keeping them accessible at the top.

Final Product

Onboarding & Sign-up

The onboarding steps are designed to create a personalized experience for users, allowing the AI to provide more tailored support during narrative auto-completion, weekly reports, character suggestions and community recommendations.

Start a New Narrative

To prevent AI over-reliance, the empathy score is only earned when users input their own narrative following empathy guidelines and tips, encouraging independent empathy growth. Additionally, Co-Imagine AI can be turned off anytime in the narrative settings based on user preference.

Narrative Log

Recognizing that empathy is a progressive skill and perspectives can fluctuate over time, the Narrative Log allows users to review, reflect, and revise past entries. To deepen understanding, Narrative Remix enables users to explore one situation from multiple perspectives or one perspective across multiple situations.

Community & Perspective Exchange

The community fosters an inclusive space for sharing ideas, exchanging viewpoints, and engaging in meaningful interactions. Users not only empathize with others' perspectives but also have the opportunity to share their own, creating a two-way exchange of understanding.

Key Takeaways

My biggest takeaway from this project is learning how to expand on an existing idea from my LLM research into a practical product that provides real-world solutions for users. I brainstormed various ways to better integrate empathy growth into daily life, using my research as a foundation to understand the problem space and explore potential solutions. This experience made me learn the importance of design research, showing me that research shouldn't be confined to a single field but can draw from multiple disciplines to create more impactful solutions.

Let’s Get In Touch!

yangmanzhang@gmail.com

2025