Enhancing social connections of seniors

When I picture myself as an elderly in thirty years later, I can find myself into two different scenes. One is I’m sitting alone at my living room , lost my connections with society and thinking how unfair it is that I’m stereotyped that I cannot learn or unable to change. The other one is I’m socially active and exchanging experiences with younger generations as people don’t stigmatise the elderly. I personally prefer to be in later one. But the question is how? I believe we should start now.

Problem Statement

Due to Australia’s growing ageing population and longer life expectancy, the 25% of seniors who live alone are increasingly prone to loneliness and being socially isolated. With the increasing levels of health issues, negative stereotypes, and lower activity, there is an increasing concern for active living and social connection within Australia’s retired and semi retired population.

How might we find a way that does not stereotype or stigmatise the elderly? The idea is to turn the problem completely around and look at it from an opposite angle.  Rather than us helping the elderly, how can the elderly help society whilst still achieving our goal to help them?

Ideate

We build a bold idea that is “voluntary service”, the elderly can participate in volunteer services with children. The reason is that children are naturally active and have a lot of imagination, and also most seniors have enough time and patience with children play together. This can greatly promote communication with the elderly and help solve the loneliness and social connections of the elderly.

Challenge

• Our team had a lot of problems with the option of having children and senior to meet in a common place , such as a community centre.
• How do we organise events?
• How do we use existing resources to maximise the participation and communication of older people and young children?
• How to strengthen spiritual activities?
• How to improve activity level and social interaction?
• How often to organise an event?
• Where to set up an activity centre or entertainment place?
• What benefits can the program bring to the elderly?
• How can we overcome the difficulties associated with the program?

How It Works

Through the below analysis, each member of our group has designed a different kind of activity to achieve the aim of increasing activity and social interaction, and all participants would meet weekly at the local community centre at a predetermined time. After two months there would be a Fun Day to celebrate their new friendships.

A tool to make our idea work was the idea to create a website, like “Tinder”.The idea is that older people and younger children create their own profiles, share their own unique skills and interesting videos, and then swipe left and right to select the appropriate match, to provide users with more choices. When an older person is matched with a younger child, we provide them with recreational activities that are appropriate to their interests, and then provide them with activity centre to enhance practical communication, not a conversation on the Internet. At the same time, we all provide different planning activities, such as using games, building a garden, travelling in the countryside and so on.

Through preliminary discussions and judgments, our group believes that the idea of building a website is a good idea, but because the vast majority of older people have limited ability to use technology, we also proposed to use iPad.

Buddy Power Mentorship is voluntary service, the elderly can participate in volunteer services with children. The reason is that children are naturally active and have a lot of imagination, and also most seniors have enough time and patience with children play together. This can greatly promote communication with the elderly and help solve the loneliness and social connections of the elderly.

Prototype

To prototype the Buddy power Mentorship program, we needed to show seniors how our idea would work alongside the application for ipad. The prototype intends to make the whole idea tangible and allowing seniors to provide valuable feedback.
By using the online tool Miro in this phase, each team member made a prototype based on their design perspective for iPad, which was the tool to connect the seniors to the children.
After we selected the best one, we started to develop it to add all the best features of other models.
My proposed prototype,  featuring two separate applications (seniors, children), skills and gender filters and senior’s programs. The team determined to have one application as a whole based on simplicity.

Final Prototype

The basis of this design is to make it more friendly for both the elderly and youth. It keeps modern-day navigation solutions such as edge swiping for the youth, whilst also having buttons. It is also straightforward to navigate due to the central system, only being three layers deep.
After the design of each part was completed, we decided to try to work out how to make this for iPad rather than iPhone, as seniors are more comfortable with the larger screen and usually kids have an iPad before they have a phone. As a result, the iPad version has been developed with lorem ipsum as final output to ask for feedback from our users.

Testing

Testing is an important phase of the Design Thinking process as we now seek feedback from the possible users of the product or the solution. It helps us to understand the impediments and identify areas for improvement from the users’ point of view.
Once the team was ready with the prototype, as part of the next step of the Design Thinking process we were ready to test. The solution serves two groups of users, elderly and the children. But for this step our focus group for testing was the elderly.
There were two things that we needed to test, the idea and also the iPad application. We focused on testing the application. As it was agreed upon in the prototyping and ideation stages, we created the iPad version of the prototype for testing.

Feedback – Ideate

The consensus was that the idea was innovative as elderly often end up feeling like a burden to their families, they can suffer from loneliness or miss their grandchildren, this concept can help in a way to make them feel like their contributions

are important. We could have tested this further as we had focused on the application more than the idea as a whole. This part of the testing was more done as an introduction to the application.

Seniors:

• I like the idea of the program especially since my grandchildren are in Melbourne and I don’t see them often enough.

• I like that I could potentially be around more small children now that mine are no longer little.

• I wish that there were ways that we could venture further than just the neighbourhood centre as activities would be limited there.

Parents: 

• parents might not have sufficient time to put their child into the program regularly,

• There is a concern regarding the location where the program will be hosted in terms of safety of the child. Would there be an age limit for a child to choose a mentor?

• And how many parents would allow their children to use a smart phone/device this often?

User Testing

Technical / Interface standpoint:

• First page has two lots of sign in buttons.

• Buttons too small and same colour as text

• Text is too narrow

• Photo too small – later added to make photo square so to include the activity/skill in image instead of a video.

• Text colour hard to read

• Questions were missing would like to have seen how that worked more

• forget the video – “i would participate in the program, but i would hate to do a video, just a fun photo is enough”

• yes / no buttons rather than swipe.

• Don’t like it on a phone, prefer on an iPad

• Edge swipe is hard to use

• Colour transitions made it confusing

• Calendar didn’t make sense

• Didn’t understand how to turn off app.

• Make the child’s page more colourful, this could arouse the child’s enthusiasm,

• With 3 pages profile at first, she was confused, she couldn’t understand each page what it is made for. (I think the reason is that we didn’t name each page properly for example “choose your body” page)

• At each page I must talk to her about the purpose of this page and I think it’s not correct, the reason is that I couldn’t show her transition of the page perfectly.

• Had profile pic indicated instead of the logo, which was confusing.

• Add a small tutorial in the beginning.

Reflect

In conclusion, upon reflecting on our group’s process and approach towards Ideation, iteration, prototyping, we believe that. While there were some limitations such as time to our final outcome in terms of implementing user feedback into the final application prototype, we believe that as a whole. Our overall outcome of the project was quite successful in addressing the problem statement of, how might we help retirees maintain active living and social connection.