Defusing Digital Discord
From addressing first‑phone conflicts to battling young‑professional burnout, MMM students helped Verizon reimagine what healthy tech use can look like.
More than 60 percent of parents say their kids ages 12 and under use a smartphone, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. As more children get their hands on cell phones, the concerns and conflicting thoughts about their digital health persist.
Students in Northwestern's MBA + MS Design Innovation (MMM) program—a dual-degree program between Northwestern Engineering and the Kellogg School of Management—tried to address some of those questions.
The students were part of two teams inside the program’s Research-Design-Build (RDB) course that partnered with Verizon to promote improved digital health. One team tackled the parent-child relationship surrounding a kids' first phone, while a second worked on better phone habits among young professionals.
Both received an early MMM experience in one of the program’s central tenets: human-centered design.
“This project prepared me to be a better listener and more empathetic toward the people that I work with,” Elise Chao (MMM ‘27) said. “MMM is a very collaborative culture, and just like the real world, these are skills that I will need throughout my career.”
Elise worked on the team focusing on young adults alongside Vaibhav Agrawal (MMM '27), Will Hooks (MMM '27), Valeria Jarufe (MMM '27), Tyler Katz (MMM '27), and Rishabh Mittal (MMM '27).
The group tackling the parent-child phone dilemma consisted of Jane Choe (MMM '27), Jan Kite-Powell (MMM '27), Tanya Mamgain (MMM '27), Josh Park (MMM '27), and Nathan Salomon (MMM '27).
Josh said he enjoyed the freedom RBD gave his team to go far beyond the initial Verizon prompt asking for help to improve its family app experience. The team’s solution traveled back to the time before such an app would even be necessary—during the purchasing decision.
“We realized that a lot of the tensions that occur later on come from the initial part of that journey,” Josh said. “So we identified touchpoints that we could improve to get them to have a shared set of expectations around phone use and healthy digital relationships.”
That solution started by ideating a new purchasing journey aimed specifically for parents to help foster conversations with their children about digital technology.
Once a phone is purchased online, the first package to arrive isn’t the phone itself. Rather, it is a letter and a card game about the new phone and the responsibilities that come with it.
The final step in this new journey is a collaborative boot-up and activation process that once again focuses on healthy parent-child communication.
“The whole journey is themed around the responsibilities of the digital world, of actually having a phone,” Nathan said. “This pent-up energy is channeled into this very healthy conversation between child and parent. Getting a phone represents another step in their life, so we better frame it as that.”
Those steps don’t stop with a first-phone purchase. The second student team created what it called “Connect to Disconnect (C2D),” a service designed to help young working adults experience life outside of their phone.
C2D rewards people for reducing screen time with in-person experiences they can enjoy with friends. These reductions earn users points they can redeem for restaurant gift cards, cycle classes, and other activities that promote in-person social interaction.
“Our solution helps Verizon position themselves as a leader in this digital wellbeing space and further differentiate themselves from their competitors,” Elise said. “It also works well with their current established partnerships and allows them a new revenue stream.”
Both student teams said their RDB experiences proved valuable in subsequent MMM courses and that the RDB course itself was foundational to their growth.
“I learned how to let the users’ experiences guide not just our solution, but also the problem that we were trying to solve,” Tyler said. “Case studies are useful, but being able to hop on a Zoom call and get real-time feedback from our challenge partner added another dimension to the problem that a written case study cannot provide.”