An App for Senior Citizens
Au.tro is a companion application for senior citizens (65-85 years old) that motivates them to be active while connecting them with their community and avoiding isolation.
Where It All Began
This project began with my grandma who is currently living in Vietnam. At the age of 75, she enjoys her time cooking, looking after her grandkids or taking care of her plants. Living in the midst of a fast-paced city with everyone is always busy, she often struggles to stay active and connected with her families and friends. As a team of designers, we believed that my grandma and her fellow senior citizens deserve the best opportunities to enjoy the great quality of life.
MY ROLE
Interaction Designer
Visual Designer
SETTING
Human Factors
14 Weeks, FALL 2019
TEAM
Zachra Pradipta
Eric Flatt
DID YOU KNOW?
In 2030, senior citizens will occupy up to 19% of the US population - the same amount of people who own an iPhone today!
The Challenges
With a great increasing number of senior citizens, more than 40% of senior population often experience isolation and loneliness. This problem can create a tremendous negative impact on their health physically and mentally.
The Goal
We want to foster a healthy environment for elders to be able to perform daily routines and actively forming connections.
HMW motivate senior citizens to have an active routine and stay connected to their communities?
✨User Analysis
With a research goal in mind, we created a set of questions that allow elders to articulate their stories and emotions to us.
Despite the challenges of getting senior participants for our interviews, we were lucky enough to get in touch with 14 people including elders, social workers, families (and many video calls with my grandma) so we could hear the stories around elders from all different angles before we started narrowing down our scope
PAIN POINTS
🌍 Sense of community
Elders experience difficulty in finding supports, companionships and acceptances from their community.
🏃♂️Staying active and social
Environments and health issues often lower elders’ self-esteem to initiate or join social situations.
👴 Being independent
Elders want to be able to spend time on their own without having to feel lonely or isolated.
🤩 Feeling Motivated
The lack of motivation often leads to lazy days, which can cause negative health impact in the long term.
✨Narrowing Our Scope
With the key paint points , my team could fully paint a picture of the elders’ journey and their emotions so we could identify the opportunities for our solution to seamlessly solve the problem. From there, we set out 3 core values that appeared throughout the research and we believed it would keep our ideas on the right path.
Connection • Productivity • Growth
✨Ideation, Architecture, Iterations
After several hours of ideating, we finalized our idea and started mapping out the overall flow of the application. With our target audience being elders, an accessible and intuitive interface plays an important role in our solution. Laying all the features and functions down on notecards allowed us to efficiently rearrange them to see different ways an elder would interact with it (growing up so close with my grandma definitely made this process a bit easier)
✨Wireframe and Visualization
Keeping our target audience in mind, we fully understood the impact of our user interface (UI) and decided to focus on tablet UI due to its larger size and popularity to the elders. As we continued to move further with the tablet UI, we kept an open mind for further iterations while developing visual design system that would aesthetically speak out to the elders and have a good color contrast.
As we started moving on to Mid-Fi wireframes, we had lots of doubts on our decisions with the interface as well as the color choices.
✨Test, don’t guess!
INSIGHTS
Senior actually prefer smart phones over tablets
People agreed our solution was “neat” but not super interesting.
The interface and contents were confusing for several elders
So what did that leave us with? 🤷♂️
It was challenging for us to hear that “our baby” was not the perfect solution. We felt defeated but not completed. We went back to sketching/developing a mobile UI and redefined the interaction within our solution to address the insights we received from elders.
DID YOU KNOW?
We are adding approximately 1.2 years of life for every person that overcomes loneliness
Meet Ben - the retiree
Ben is a 83 years old retiree, who currently lives alone in Columbia, SC. He often experiences loneliness due to the death of his wife 4 years ago and his children don’t live in the same state. As much as he tries to stay active, he has to limit himself because he does not know what to do that is appropriate to health.
Needs and Goals:
- He wants social interaction without being a burden
- He wants to gain self confidence
- He wants to talk to his families more often
- He wants to keep up with his physique
🎉 INTRODUCING 🎉
Au.tro - Motivate to Connect
Au.tro is designed with elders to help them making the most out of their day despite the challenges come from aging. By answering some brief questions to start the day, elders can simply fill up their to-do list with appropriate activities, from indoor to outdoor; or scrolling through chat forum and keeping up with trendy topics among fellow seniors and many more!
🌞 Start the Morning Right!
This approach allows the application to gain an understanding of elders’ feelings so it can suggest appropriate events to do throughout the day.
🏋️♀️ Be Productive, Effortlessly
Elders can see and add suggested activities that are picked specifically for them. Completing daily activities will lead them closer to achieve the daily goal and recognize their own effort.
⛓ Connecting at All Time
With a modern UI, seniors no longer have to face the stigma of “chat forum is for old people” while browsing, learning and sharing on trendy topics.
🎁 Relive and Reward
Reliving memories through library of scrapbooks can build confidence and motivation.
Also, seniors LOVE coupons! Achieving their daily goals will give them benefits on transportation, groceries, and more…!
✨Conclusion
With Au.tro, seniors can:
-Slow down the decline of cognitive ability by 70%
-Gain confidence and feel motivated.
-Stay connected with their friends, families and community.
-Create a healthy habit of staying active.
-Reduce stress, anxiety, depression, loneliness.
Takeaways
This project allowed me to fully understand the value of empathy and what it really means to “Design for Users.” This project showed me that no design process is the same and it is important to be able to adapt and tackle the challenges within a timely manner. Moving forward, I would like to revisit the flow of the app and flesh out all the screens as well as sharpening up visual elements to make sure the app is fully accessible for every senior.