Elders feel disconnected with their family members and loved ones.
Family members can be too busy to visit their grandparents, or young children may grow distant and feel detached from what used to be a enjoyable moment with their grandparents.
Observing other apps to see what worked and what didn't work
Key Takeaway: Most of the apps have simple and consistent layout, large and legible contrasting colors, social connections that lead to digital and physical communities
Value Proposition
A focus on fostering and maintaining relationships between elders and family/friends in order to re-establish and strengthen family connections.
It's all about family
Created for users ages 65+. According to a report from the CDC, ~25% of adults aged 65 and older are lonely, causing affects of depression and anxiety. Reminiscence offers an easy to use mobile app interface which allows them to connect with their friends and family.
We interviewed our grandparents and friend's grandparents in order to understand their common life pain points.
Designing in Figma
"How might we"
Support elders and their loved ones to have deeper, more meaningful conversations, more often?
Position elders as domain experts by enabling them to make their stories, memories, and anecdotes more accessible to the ones they love?
Create a repository of personal stories that younger generations can have access to, long after their elder loved one passes away?
Design & Testing
Designing in Figma
Final Design
My team and I designed the final High-Fidelity prototype design with our user feedback and insights in mind
Finalizing designs
Reflection
During this project I've learned a lot. As a designer and as a active team member.
Identifying the constraints: We chose to limit the scope to elder mental health because our team found that designing for elders will be the next great challenge for the next foreseeable future. We perceived mobile applications as: modern, everyone can easily use most apps with little to no problems. However, this is not always the case, a good designer considers all possible accessibility issues for all ages.
Also, during our testing phase, we recognize that the user-testing participants in our study were not fully representative of all elders who uses a smartphone device. Thus further inclusion of diverse levels of mobile apps and mobile phones elderly users should be interviewed.
Making it a frictionless experience is desirable enough: Originally we had implemented 3 core features: sharing music, photos, and prompts, in attempt to provide a differentiation factor from other similar existing mobile applications . We fell into the trap thinking that these unique features would make seniors adopt and use the app. The attempt to cram all these features fail to realize the existing pain points that our elderly users have already mentioned. As a team, we learned to re-orient ourselves and let go of ideas that may not be bringing real value to the users.