Domain
UI/UX Design × Human Connection
My Role
Designer & Developer
Timeline
Sep – Dec 2024
Christmas Cardlendar.
A digital advent calendar for connection across distance
I reimagine the traditional advent calendar to restore the joy of shared holiday surprises.
Gift-giving becomes especially meaningful in long-distance relationships, where physical presence is often impossible. Yet traditional Christmas advent calendars are material-intensive, costly to ship, and limited in personalization—often losing their emotional value once the holiday ends.
I believe meaningful connection is built not through material value, but through intention, anticipation, and shared rituals. This conviction led me to reimagine the advent calendar as a digital, relationship-centered experience that transforms waiting into a moment of connection and turns daily anticipation into emotional continuity.
Problem
How might we foster shared anticipation and emotional connection across distance through an advent calendar?
Outcome
I designed an interactive advent calendar with daily reveals, playful micro-interactions, and personal messages.
Final Key Features
In early October 2024, I began with interface design in Figma and later deployed a functional web prototype built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Interactive Advent Cards
The countdown unfolds through 24 interactive cards, with future dates locked and past states muted to reinforce anticipation and a sense of temporal progression.
Saving and Sharing Meaningful Moments
To extend emotional impact beyond each reveal, the design supports saving and sharing cards, allowing meaningful moments to persist rather than fade.
Interactive & Playful Design
Christmas Cardlendar is designed as a daily check-in countdown experience. Beyond the core reveal mechanism, I introduced playful interactive elements—such as a greeting Santa, customizable Christmas trees, and animated countdown timers—to create a sense of companionship and festive engagement.
Empathize with the users
In the initial phase, I conducted user research with 8 participants in long-distance relationships through semi-structured interviews and contextual conversations to examine holiday gift-giving behaviors, emotional expectations around advent calendars, and challenges associated with physical gifts.
Three key insights from user research on gift-giving values, Christmas experiences, and long-distance gifting constraints.
Ideation & Prototype
From concept sketches to an interactive web prototype, I explored playful visual interaction design to create an online advent calendar centered on anticipation and daily reveals.
User Testing in the Wild
I deployed the final design in a public campus space for user testing, collecting feedback through spontaneous conversations and written sticky notes on a custom feedback board.
Over three days, I gathered 76 written notes and engaged in 50+ user conversations, capturing immediate real-world reactions to the experience.
Photos from in-the-wild user testing and the feedback board.