Wiser
a learning app designed for older adults interested in improving and sharing their technology skills
My role
UX/UI Designer, UX Researcher
Duration
Oct 2019 - Dec 2019
Project Type
Graduate School Project
Team
Feifei Deng, Mari, Cristina
overview
problem space
01.
Products are not intuitive enough to older adults
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The technical issues they face everyday make being adaptive to the rapid-changing digital world extremely difficult
02.
Lack of access to learn new technology or seek technical help
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For older adults who live in senior care facilities, although there will be technical specialists to help them to solve problems, the schedule constraints reduce the flexibility for older adults to learn new technologies and seek technical help
03.
Online resources for technology learning are optimized for older adults
There are plenty of online resources for technology learning, but few are optimized for older adults and even fewer take advantage of the abundance of knowledge older adults have to offer.
" You born with new technologies, these (new digital products) are natural to your generation. But not for us, we feel like outsiders..."
How might we
design an app that allows older adults to confidently learn and teach technology usage with their peers?
A learn and ask platform that allows older adults to feel more comfortable to interact with and provide help for their long-term learning and urgent technical issues.
solution
research
refined design question
Our teammate Cristina shared her experience of working as a technical specialist at Apple store, her stories about the obstacles that older adults encountered and their eagers of staying connected to others interested us.
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After our brainstorming sessions, we specifically wanted to examine how older adults could use the Internet to build community and make new friends. This led us to our initial design question
“How can we design an app that allows older adults to interact and collaborate with their peers online?”
research methodology
01.
User Interviews
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Phone interviews with 6 participants who currently live in the US
02.
Fly On The Wall
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I visited and observed how seniors used technologies at a senior center near UW
03.
Competitive Analysis
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We compared and analyzed 5 different platform/app that senior used
key takeaways
"I don't want to make new friends online, you don't know who they really are behind that screen..."
01.
None of the participants were interested in making new friends online.
02.
Most participants preferred face-to-face interactions with new people
03.
Some participants like learning new skills and sharing what they learned with other people
We didn't notice that our potential users are not really interested in making new friends online, but rather be interested in learning new skills until we finished first round of user research. Thus, we quickly changed our mindset to build a product that allows older adults to learn and share about new technology.
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At this point, we used the unexpected results of our user research to refine our design question
“How might we design an app that allows older adults to confidently learn and teach technology usage with their peers?”
research procedure
Research was an essential part of our project as we needed to understand how seniors used technology in their daily life, what issues they have encountered, and how they learned new technology. It was also important for us to test the prototype to gather useful feedback and reveal the possible usability issues.
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the users
Our findings showed that older adults vary greatly in their comfort level with technology.
Out of all the adults we interviewed, 75% of them felt comfortable in their skills with technology, while 25% did not. Also, while observing the older adults in the senior center, we saw that a majority of the adults needed additional support with technology.
Thus, two personas were created to represent two typical user groups based on our research.
meet our personas
design goals
Using our observations, interview results, and analysis from apps used by adults 55 and older, we developed the following list of design requirements that were commonly requested by participants.
01.
Accessible UI & UX
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Consider the experience of people with various needs, including those that are hearing, vision, and dexterity-related.
03.
Intuitive design
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Users should be able to follow the path of completing a task without needing assistance.
02.
Hands-free option
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Give users the option to use a voice assistant, especially when searching for topics.
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04.
Create an engaging experience
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Motivate the users to want to return to the platform.
design
concept exploration
We used affinity map to brainstorming what are users' wants and needs, and what are their pain points. Based on the results, I created 'one day with Nancy' to further identify the potential design opportunities.
one day with Nancy
sketches
Equipped with the design opportunities, we used sketches to explore the flow individually. Then we discussed and provided critiques to sketches as a team. We picked what we liked, what could be improved, and combined them together. In this stage, we defined the four main features of the app: Home, Post, Notice, and Profile. These features were revised and simplified to Learn, Ask and My profile after first usability testing.
from paper to low-fi
Based on the feedback we received by testing on the paper prototype during peer review, we focused on our own flow and iterated the design to make it more accessible and better help users to achieve their goals. The two main features I was responsible for were Home feed and Post.
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iterations
key iterations
Home & New Post
challenge 02.
Missed some of key elements including button size, posting process, terminologies and user mindset that would negatively affect older adults' experience.
solution 02.
Simplified the flow of creating new post, used senior's familiar ways to optimize the wordings.
According to the feedback I received from peer review, I did the following design changes:
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Simplified the home feed and separated it into three sections: “Popular,” "Recommended,” and “Categories.”
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The user can also post articles to share the knowledge they have gained while learning on the app. Keeping in mind the feedback my team used in the past, I made the flow as clear as possible.
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"It's hard to follow these steps, am I finished posting?..."
However, I discovered couple problems during usability testing at the senior center.
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Users expressed it was difficult to find the button that allowed them to create a post.
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The posting process was also confusing, they were not sure what the icons represented.
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Users would like to have an obvious place to title their post.
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from mid-fi to hi-fi
We used the recommendations from our last user tests to make changes to our design and created an interactive, mid-fidelity prototype on Figma. Our interactive prototype was then tested on four adults between the ages of 70 to 92 at a senior center. Afterwards, we completed three more usability tests on our fellow classmates.
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key iterations
Home & New Post
challenge 03.
Users still felt unsure sometimes. The hesitation would discourage them from exploring the app.
solution 03.
Observed how seniors explained technical knowledge to each other and applied their language to our design.
Before the usability testing, we simplified the overall product to more fit our users' mindset as well as reconsidered part of the wordings to eliminate confusions. To addressed the usability issues we discovered, I did the following main changes:
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Added a larger, more prominent “create a post” button at the top of the page
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Made the article posting process more accessible by reducing the number of steps and adding simple instructions when necessary.
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Welcoming and encouraged words to help users to stay motivated throughout the overall experience
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"Sorry...but why should I post something if I'm learner?... "
However, there were still some gaps existed, although the users expressed the wordings were better but they sometimes still felt unsure. The hesitation would discourage them from exploring the app at some points. Here are what we found during the testing:
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Users felt unsure of what “Create a post” and “Trending Now” meant.
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The pictures in the “Categories” section were difficult to interpret.
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Users are unclear as to why they would want to create instructional posts if they are “Learners.”
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It was insightful when I observed how older adults teach each other of new technology, they used various methods including metaphors to explain the problems and solutions.
challenge 04.
Users we tested didn't understand why some features existed as they were learner. The product failed to fit the learners' exclusive needs
solution 04.
Considering the time constraints, we narrowed down the project scope to only learner interface to deliver better experience
design outcomes
interactive prototype
reflection
what I learned
As the first project I've ever done in UX field, I'm grateful that we've encountered various type of unexpected problems and were still able to continue work under constraints. I've learned valuable experience from this project, here are some key takeaways.
01.
Empathy with users will help me to move forward and stay motivated
The willing of helping older adults became much more stronger when I actually went to the senior housing and observed how they interacted with technologies. By volunteering myself as a technical specialist, I understood how difficult it could be for older adults to seek for technical help
02.
Understand the users and learn from mistakes
We've been through choosing the wrong design direction because of making the wrong assumptions about our target users. It revealed how important of understanding users' needs and the needs of validating the assumptions as soon as possible. We are not the users, we made mistakes, but being able to learn from mistakes and understand why we made the mistakes helps us to build a clearer direction to our design
03.
I must put my feet into user's shoes and speak their language
This maybe a cliché. However, during the whole process, I was able to aware the gaps created by inefficient understanding of wordings. Each user group has their unique way to interpret the product, speaking their language and perceiving product from their perspective will be important for eliminating the cognitive gaps.