WiseDesign
Problem
There is a rapidly growing portion of the worlds population above the age of 60, projected to approximately double by 2050 according to the UN, but this population has been largely overlooked in the design of new products and services. These elderly users have more age-specific challenges to design for, but receive less attention from design research teams.
Solution
We conducted an in depth literature review about design considerations for the elderly, competitive analysis of the tools out there already, ideation of our own tool, prototyping, and usability testing/validation. We created a prototype interactive tool in the form of a mobile app for design teams to use with extensive information about designing for the elderly. Our tool organizes the information into the different steps in the design process and categories like anatomy, cognition, and social. Design teams can easily and quickly access the information they need pertaining to their specific project.
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Impact
WiseDesign would directly impact the design team's ability to include a wide range of specific, informed design considerations for the elderly that they may not have considered otherwise. This leads to more empathy for the user on the part of the designer and a final product that is more equitable for a wider range of users.
For a more detailed breakdown of the project, processes, and pictures of the prototypes, see below.
Project Brief
Our team was tasked with creating a tool for use within a design process model of our choosing. It could have any target user group, be embodied in any form, be implemented at any step or throughout the whole design process, and had to be validated through a plan generated by the team. We chose to use the Stanford d.school's design process model (shown below) because of its foundational importance to the field and its pragmatism.
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After playing around with a couple ideas we settled on a tool to help design for the elderly, as we had seen articles about the growing number, and each had people who could be considered elderly by age in our lives.
Literature Review & Competitor Analysis
We split up an extensive literature review of over 30 scholarly papers about design for the elderly, breaking them up into information bullet points in 7 categories, Social, Anatomical, Physical, Cognitive, Actions, Design Process, and General. We also looked into the tools already out there for people to empathize with the elderly, including a body suit that simulates the pains and difficulties of aging and a design guide put out by a firm, but found that they were too expensive, or not sufficiently interactive and in-depth enough.
Two examples of products to help design for the elderly we found. (frogdesign.com & age-simulation-suit.com)
Prototype
As we were doing the work of synthesizing and organizing the information we found in our literature review, we decided on a mobile app format for the prototype of our tool. We created a first iteration of the app (shown below) which focused on two categories, Considerations for the Design Process and Considerations for the Aging Body, but we found information that didn't fit cleanly into either of those so we rethought our categories and subcategories, which are seen in the current prototype. The most recent prototype can be found and interacted with at this link.
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In designing this tool, we aimed to create a tool that would be interactive, build empathy for elderly users, and provide specific recommendations to teams mapped to specific stages of the design process to guide them.
The first iteration of the app. Notice only two categories for information and the buttons on the human figure which give you access to information about those anatomical areas.
User Testing & Validation
With a final prototype completed, we created a user testing protocol and recruited users matching our target definition (young professional familiar with product design at some level) to run through our proctored test. The test gave users one of two example design tasks, and had them complete prompts along the way in each stage of the design process. They were allowed to use our tool as much or as little as they wanted. A second design task was given after the initial task in which participants were not allowed to use the app. See an excerpt from a test below.
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We used post-task questions and measurements of the difference between the two design activities to validate the hypothesis that our tool can improve designers' ability to include a wide range of informed design considerations for aging effects that they may not consider otherwise. Some graphs of the improvements made can be seen below.
Some of the post task questions used to evaluate the impact of our tool.
An example of a participant completed task with sketches. The prompt was "Design a product for the elderly to use in their bathroom".
These graphs were created afterwards to show visually the numerical improvements we made with our tool.