PROCESS
Innovation starts with understanding human needs.
From January - July 2020 our team learned from 140+ aging adults, adult children, and experts across ages 30-93. We utilized various research methodologies to uncover unmet needs and pain points that would inform our design direction.
Landscape Research
We explored analogous domains and scientific literature, analyzed competitive solutions, and consulted with CMU game design and persuasive design experts to situate our work.
INSIGHTS
Existing monitoring solutions do not provide sufficient value to aging adults, and are therefore under-adopted.
Aging adults defy the common stereotype that they are technophobic or technologically illiterate. Aging adults actually utilize mainstream technology to improve their lives in similar ways to younger demographics.
Nationwide Materials
We dove deep into materials provided by Nationwide, including previous domain research and related internal initiatives, to gain a firm grasp of the domain.
INSIGHTS
Many aging adults and adult children avoid or struggle discussing age-related topics. Aging adults feel these discussions may burden their children, while their children don't want to address a time when they will be without their parents.
Similarly, aging adults and adult children are often hyper-sensitive to the concerns of the other party, but those perceptions are often mistaken. This further stalls productive discourse.
Semi-Structured Interviews
We spoke with people who expressed their reservations, hopes, and highlights about their lives and futures. Each interview contributed to a fuller mental model of an aging adult and an adult child in the aging in place experience.
INSIGHTS
Aging adults don’t want to be reminded of their age, but constant conversations and products targeted at them do exactly that.
A connection with family, especially grandchildren, is a supreme value for aging adults that only becomes more important as they age.
Directed Storytelling
To better understand unmet needs and functional gaps, we had participants recount specific examples where they had difficulty interacting with loved ones from afar.
INSIGHTS
For adult children, the "checking in" process is often laborious, time-consuming, and frustrating.
An adult child shifts between multiple roles when interacting with their aging parent - those of a caregiver, child, friend, and advisor.
30+ Storyboards
in
3 Rounds of Speed Dating
We created storyboards to explore needs around aging, retirement, and monitoring. We conducted a series of speed dating sessions, a process of quickly presenting storyboards to participants to elicit immediate impressions.
INSIGHTS
Many aging adults find purpose and meaning in retirement by giving advice and transmitting wisdom to future generations.
Aging adults want to stay active in retirement, and utilize products that encourage them to do so.
5 Collage Boards
By providing participants with a question prompt and a range of images to express their answer, we utilized the collage board to get at underlying emotions which were difficult to elicit in traditional interviews. Because we conducted these remotely, participants selected custom images online to better express their sentiments.
INSIGHTS
Adult children often juggle responsibilities between their parents, their own families, and their professional lives, resulting in overwhelm and stress.
When an aging adult experiences an acute health event, adult children feel an enormous sense of guilt and believe they could have done something to prevent it.
Synthesizing generative research
After conducting our initial phase of research we generated hundreds of quotes, ideas, and anecdotes from interviews. We synthesized them into a single affinity diagram using an adapted Holtzblatt method.
2 Surveys
After numerous rounds of qualitative research, we condensed our insights into two 10-minute surveys - one each for aging adults and adult children. Our goal was to validate the strength of our insights among a wider population and quantify our populations’ attitudes about remote health monitoring.
INSIGHTS
Many topics that adult children rated “need to know” were the exact topics that aging adults were not comfortable sharing, including emotional health, financial health, medical decisions, and accounts and passwords.
For adult children, providing emotional care to their parent was more important than providing medical guidance.
Conceptual Validation
Once we narrowed our design concept, we created low and mid-fidelity prototypes to more concretely represent our ideas. We tested these with aging adults and adult children to understand both perspectives.
INSIGHTS
Aging adults and their adult children often struggle with coordinating phone calls and often experience awkward pauses during check-ins.
Interaction with family, especially grandchildren, is not only a motivator for adoption, but an avenue for expressing and improving emotional health.
3 Rounds of
Usability Testing
Designing for differing needs between aging adults and adult children, we tested our high-fidelity design with both parties to ensure a usable and delightful experience.
INSIGHTS
Some innovative features need a "wizard" to teach users what to do, no matter how intuitive the design may seem.
Many icons require labels to be understandable, especially for those with visual impairments.
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