We designed an application that motivates elders to stay active, set goals and promote a great sense of community.
MY ROLE
Interaction Designer
Visual Designer
TIMELINE
14 Weeks, FALL 2019
TEAM
Zachra Pradipta
Eric Flatt
BACKGROUND
In 2030, senior citizens will occupy up to 19% of the US population - the same amount of people who own an iPhone today!
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.
THE PROBLEM
Elders (age 65-85) often struggle to stay productive and form a healthy routine around their community.
With a great increasing number of elders, more than 40% of this population often experience isolation and loneliness due to the lack of social connections. Isolation and loneliness can create a tremendous negative impact on their health physically and mentally.
OPPORTUNITY
What if elders is provided with opportunities to set purpose, stay active and strengthen their social life?
We want to foster a healthy environment for elders to be able to perform daily routines and actively feeling connected to the community.
As a group of young designers, we see the importance and potentials within designing for elders because simply we are designing for our future self.
✨User Analysis
With a research goal in mind, we created a set of questions that would allow elders to articulate their stories and emotions to us. We wanted to 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, 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 in front us 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)
✨Initial 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.
✨User Testing
A comprehensive user testing plan allowed us to successfully gain better understanding of the user flow and avoid any bias. We received incredible insights that completely shaped our design in a new direction.
1. The perfect home page
With the assumption of the more simple the better, I created A but it actually challenged elders to navigate themselves, there were many elders did not know how to use the search bar. B was added with more features and personalization that incentivize elders to use the application. I pursued C due to its great hierarchy between each sections and the goal is broken down which helps to provide shorter distance to reach each milestone.
2. Stay Up-To-Date
After testing, B was consistent but it contained unnecessary information and it is not a natural interaction for elders to switch between tabs “Most popular” and “Recent”. I chose A because elders can have all the information on the same screen while they still can easy to navigate all the information.
3. Navigation Bar
With A, I noticed that elders were hesitant to tap on since they didn’t understand the icons. Therefore, I went back to the traditional way (B) of having icons and text to show what each icon means
4. Visual Design
Even though I received great feedbacks on the contrast of A, but the colors were very muted and made the interfaces seemed outdated. I pursued B because of the higher contrast and boldness, the white background increased the overall hierarchy.
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 best memories
Scrapbooks allow events participants to edit it together and enhance sense of community. Reliving memories through library of scrapbooks can build confidence and motivation.
✨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.