Considering the Elderly - WiseDesign
Why we needed a tool for designing for advanced age
The portion of the world population considered elderly has reached a very significant size in recent years. This time in a persons life brings specific challenges that we thought weren't being addressed well enough by teams designing the products, services, and spaces elderly people must use.
Problems with existing tools
We felt that existing tools were a good step, but that they weren't interactive enough (Like this packet by Frog Design) ...
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Or too expensive for every design team to justify the cost of, like this age suit by Produkt + Projekt a German design and ergonomics company.
Our approach to a design tool
We wanted our design tool to fit into a design thinking framework. We chose the design process model pioneered by Stanford's d.school. We then compiled information from a number of academic articles about aging effects into an interactive app, organized by design process checkpoint and body part.
As we learned more about aging effects for the elderly, we iterated our prototype app to include more intuitive categories.
Click here to try out the prototype app!
We tested the second iteration of our app with our target user group, young design professionals with a range of experience in product and space design, as well as engineering backgrounds. Here is part of the user testing.
Validated impact
We were able to validate and back up our idea that our app helps people designing for the elderly to include a wide range of informed design considerations for their users they may not have otherwise considered.
Users were engaging with our app (considering useful information about designing for the elderly) about twice as much as the internet (Task 2 vs Task 1)
Users felt they were about twice as inspired on average when using our app than not (Task 2 vs Task 1)