An App for Elder | Mobile App Design
02.2016 - 05.2016 | Member: Zhaoying Li, Yanan Deng
Overview
This is an assignment for the Interactive Design class, which requires us to design an app that the elder will use even after 10 years.
Approach
Problem Space
Physical health becomes a concern these days as people grow old. For the elder, it is challenging to remember the time and quantity of pills they need to take. At the same time, because their children are often not around, elders are facing a double challenge of self-care and loneliness.
Solution
We designed a health reminder app to assist elders in remembering, taking, diagnosing medications and allows elders to share their health condition with friends and they can also help each other to take medications on time.
(Functions: self-reminding, friends-reminding, activity suggestion)
My Contribution
User Research: Identified users’ pain points by surveys and interviews.
Product Design: Came up with the product features to address the issue, designed the information architecture.
UX Design: Determined the general visual style. Designed the user interface and interaction flow.
Research & Synthesis
Dig out elders' mobile using gap
We published an offline survey to gather info about elders’ mobile phone using habit and their relationship with children. We also did 20 street interviews with people around 55 – 70 years old.
Here are the insights we found from our research:
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Traditional paid text and phone calls are the two main functions for elders. (In China, an app called WeChat provides free message sending and phone/video call functions, it has 1 billion users in China.)
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Most elders are reluctant to learn new apps. Time-consuming, illiteracy, small fonts are 3 main reasons impeded them to learn.
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Usually, elders have 1 or 2 unserious chronic diseases, most people won’t take medications.
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Elders use a pills packing box to help them remember the dosage of each medication. But there is no time reminding tools.
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For most families, children only go back home during the New year.
Design
Based on the research, we defined our design goals as below:
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Readable. The app should have a friendly font size for elders to read.
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Convenient. For people do not read, there need to be other ways for them to use this app.
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Limited functions. The app only provides the necessary function.
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Social. The app allows the elder to share their conditions with friends.
Then, we structured the features in our information architecture:
Wireframe
Register Wireframe
Function Wireframe
Low-fi Prototype
We conducted a focus group of 9 current ExxonMobil employees from 8 different teams with an average of 1.95 years of job experience to uncover the pains about ExxonMobil's current events management system. We identified two types of users: event creators and those registering for an event. Users can be in both categories, but we have this separation because the needs of these two types of users are different. Plains were revealed that:
Register & information type-in
Strong notice
