ConnectUs
Designing an event-scheduling platform to connect seniors in local communities.
Overview
ConnectUs is a mobile app designed to reduce social isolation among seniors by giving them a way to make new friends, discover new hobbies, and engage in social interactions without needing to fit into the tech-savvy Gen Z demographic that dominates social media.
This problem initially sparked my interest after observing it in my own grandparents, who struggled to find a community when they came on visits to Canada from China and thus would spend their trips socially isolated and unable to truly experience anything beyond the four walls of our house.
Role: UX Designer
User Research, Usability Testing, Wire-framing, Prototyping, Visual Design, Interaction Design
Timeline
3 months (Sept - Nov 2023)
The Problem
In the Digital Age, the way we meet people, make meaningful connections, and find communities to belong to has changed drastically: for most people, this looks like using social media on a regular basis. For seniors however, the fast-paced changing digital environment is hard to keep up with and those platforms aren’t tailored to their interests. With age also comes less and less opportunities to meet people, so seniors have been left at the forefront of a loneliness epidemic with no tools or resources to properly combat it.
The Solution
A mobile application targeted towards seniors to help find, create, and join events in their local communities. Users are able to find others nearby with similar interests and hobbies to meet up for face to face interactions using a platform catered to their technological experience.
This design followed a double diamond framework:
Discover
Learning as much as we can about the problem and the users!
Problem Discussions and Framing
We started off by setting goals and success metrics for our app to guide our core values and keep us accountable throughout the design process.
Goals
We wanted to create a digital app tailored specifically towards people who aren’t familiar with digital products and utilize the connective power of social media and the internet for a demographic that is largely unfamiliar with navigating the digital world, in order to help seniors meet new people and create new experiences.
Create an intuitive UX for senior citizens to easily navigate that supports accessibility requirements.
Encourage a higher level of social interaction and community building among seniors.
Success Metrics
We wanted to create a digital app tailored specifically towards people who aren’t familiar with digital products and utilize the connective power of social media and the internet for a demographic that is largely unfamiliar with navigating the digital world, in order to help seniors meet new people and create new experiences.
High number of users with good retention
Consistent event postings
High number of connections formed between users
Research
We started by conducting a series of semi-structured informal user interviews with the purpose of understanding the current familiarity seniors have with technology, what their social interactions look like on a day-to-day basis, and to gauge their need or want for change in either aspect.
To gather data from a wide audience, we interviewed a mix of men and women from different countries, cultures, and marital statuses.
What Did We Learn?
From our interviews, we consolidated our findings to a few key points:
Tentative Requirements:
From our user interviews we put together a set of tentative requirements. Some of these were new requirements we realized were necessary after analyzing our research, while others were from our initial brainstorming.
Must Include
method of communication
way to meet/make friends
ability to see profile and information of other users
ability to create and join events
way to upsize text or change font style
Should Include
personal information on their profile (ex. city)
ability to create group chats and communities
Could Include
ability to like profiles of others
ability to play mini-games with others in-app
non-activity event postings (ex. tips and tricks, recipes, general lifestyle discussions)
dedicated groups/pages for institutions such as nursing or senior homes
Exclude
complex social media functions (ex. sharing to other platforms, connecting accounts to other platforms, etc.)
Define
Establishing our problem statement and direction:
what are we designing, and for who?
Defining Our User
Meet Katie, an extroverted senior who just moved to a small town with a low senior population. She loves trying new activities and meeting new people, but finds it difficult to do so due to the lack of a vibrant social infrastructure. Now that the majority of social activities are facilitated online, Katie’s looking to try something easy and new for her to share those same experiences.
"Ever since I moved, it's been hard to socialize or make friends. The local community centres and libraries don't run as many events as they used to and I don't know how to meet people who have the same interests. I just need a way to connect with people, and then I could set up something for us to hang out."
Guiding Problem Statement
How might we design a mobile app that enables senior citizens to easily connect with others, while addressing challenges such as varying levels of comfort with technology, cognitive load, and accessibility needs?
Key Insights
After generating a high-level problem statement to guide our design choices, we could focus on a few key insights to help us stay on track throughout our design iterations.
The way users find and create events needs to be seamless, as participating in events and activities would be the primary way for those looking for communities to find them.
Ease in troubleshooting. Something we absolutely must include is an easy way for users to troubleshoot their problems and resources at their fingertips.
Technology should be leveraged only as a means of facilitating connection. Seniors want a platform that enables them to make in-person connections and meet others.
Feature Prioritization
From our tentative list of requirements, we narrowed down to a few key features.
Design
Exploring ideas, possibilities, and solutions.
User Flows
Before we began the design process, we created a few user flows to ensure we were designing as intuitively as possible. The two flows we created were to join an event and to add a friend. From creating user flows, we added more pop up screens and confirmation to make the interface easily understandable and accessible in navigating.
Wireframing
We began creating wireframes for key pages such as the Home, Profile, and Calendar pages where users would be able to see what events they are registered for, events near them, and view the profile of other users.
To help consolidate our thoughts, we created a table of key pages and what would be included in each of them to refer back to when designing our screens.
Style Guide
We created a style guide to guide our design process. Since our target audience is seniors, we stuck to a minimal colour system with high contrast. Additionally, we tested all of our main colours against WCAG standards to ensure accessibility.
Style Guide
Accessible Colour Combinations
Mid-Fi Mockups
As part of the design process, we created mid-fi mockups.
Usability Testing
In order to test our application against real users, we conducted usability tests with 3 of our interviewees from user interviews. We created a list of tasks for them to follow, and then conducted a survey on their experiences using a 5-point Likert Scale. Our results showed majority "Agree" and "Strongly Agree" results for questions on the usability and functionality of the app!
Tasks included navigating through the sign-up pages to create an account, successfully joining an event, messaging a friend, and finding the help page.
Heuristic Evaluations
During our design stage, we tested our prototypes by conducting heuristic evaluations. Taking our results, we made necessary changes to our prototypes. Key changes included adding labels for icons in the nav bar and redesigning our event cards for less clutter. We double checked all our prototyping to ensure user control and freedom.
Deliver
Everything needed to take this from our hands to those of real users!
Accessibility Testing and Improvements
Our next steps and improvements to make would be to do testing specifically for accessibility. Our interviews, evaluations, and tests were conducted primarily on grandparents of friends and family, which is a limited pool. We were able to interview grandparents from all over the world which was a major plus, but getting to do testing across a larger pool would give us clearer results.
Some improvements to make would be figuring out the logistics of creating events would work. After a user creates an event, if it is in a public space/paid registration based, we should see how we can incorporate actual businesses with these event postings and have a seamless integration between, for example, making a reservation for group pottery and then promoting the event for a number of participants rather than juggling multiple platforms and still communicating all the necessary details.
Final Design
ConnectUs: making it easy to stay connected
Easy-to-use log in and sign up system leads to a curated feed of events. A minimalist design for event cards keeps it easy to see details at a glance, and opening up an event card provides more details alongside an easy way to register.
Users are able to easily see who has joined or created events and send them friend requests and messages. An integrated calendar makes it easy to keep track of upcoming events.
User profile settings are easily customizable, and in the case that a user needs help, the Help button is available on every screen. User can also be redirected to a website containing an online forum, FAQ, and video tutorial for troubleshooting.
Reflections
The biggest things I learned on this design journey.
Less is More
ConnectUs was the first time I've designed for a senior audience, so I had to really remind myself at times to keep them in mind as the end users for the application. While brainstorming, doing feature prioritization, and even creating the mid-fi mockups, there were constantly new ideas that would inevitably pop up as things we could add to our app or ways we could make it more fun and unique. However, with the research we did it was clear at every step that our target users didn't want that. They wanted something simple, easy to navigate, and an app with no bells or whistles: something that does exactly what it's advertised to do, no more, no less. Through this I learned a lot about what it means to design with users in mind.
UX Design Methods
For ConnectUs we used a wide range of different UX design methods: user research, user personas, user flows, usability testing, and heuristic evaluations. These all offered amazing insight into how to design the best solution to our problem statement, and I got in a lot of practice learning how to parse through overwhelming amounts of information to pick out the best ideas.
Taking Your Time
One frustration I experienced when dealing with so much information from our research was feeling tempted to rush the process, ignore pain points that seemed too challenging to tackle, and jump straight into designing. At times I rushed a little, and that backfired on me immediately when I went back to do usability testing or double check a list of requirements and realized I had to double back and redo some of my work. Even though combing through research and scoping out the problem can be an arduous task, it makes the designing process much more simple and ensures you end up with a quality solution.
