HearMe (Case Study)
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OVERVIEW • 2. BACKGROUND • 3. RESEARCH • 4. USER INTERVIEWS • 5. AFFINITY DIAGRAM • 6. COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS • 7. INSIGHTS • 8. PROBLEM STATEMENT • 9. THE SOLUTION • 10. INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE • 11. FINAL DESIGNS
⏰ Duration: Jan - August 2022
💁 My Role: Product Designer, User Researcher, Product Strategist
🙋♀️ Teammates: Robin Ahn, Jin Park, Shuqing Li, Ayesha Raheja
⚒️ Design Tools: Figma
We care about… Helping senior citizens access technology ‼️
How might we help socially isolated seniors (adults age 65 and older) utilize mobile devices to establish new social connections within the scope of their physical and cognitive capabilities?
HearMe is a mobile knowledge exchange platform that allows senior citizens to establish new social connections by sharing their expertise with the younger generation. We used advanced HCI techniques to design a platform that allows socially-isolated seniors who often lack the means to seek meaningful online connections to alleviate loneliness and be reminded that they are important members of society.
I was raised by my grandma and have witnessed her struggles with technology first-hand. This was my passion project I put my heart and soul into during research and design efforts with the ultimate goal of benefiting our users 🖤
Designing for socially-isolated seniors with physical and cognitive barriers
This project began with our interest in designing an accessible, inclusive solution for marginalized communities that are often neglected in today’s society. While the term “technologically challenged” spans many subsections including those with disabilities, those without access to internet or electricity, or those who face monetary challenges, we decided to focus on socially-isolated seniors as our primary user group.
Interviewing our grandparents to extract opportunity areas
Before constructing a full-fledged product idea, we decided to interview 4 senior citizens who could best represent our user base to cross-check our insights from the literature review.
(swipe between different slides to read through our interview insights!)
Uncovering motives, insights, emotions, and areas for further improvement
We have discovered that the primary motivating factor behind senior citizens using their mobile devices falls down to a desire for independence and a desire to stay connected with friends and family.
Another big motivating factor behind phone usage was a desire to be entertained and kill time effectively.
The typical emotional journey of a senior citizen when accessing technology went from:
We attempted to brainstorm a few solutions to alleviate such negativity:
Analyzing senior-centric communities on Reddit, Facebook, Stitch, Quora
To understand the current availability of senior-friendly mobile community apps, we conducted a competitive analysis by evaluating the features of existing online community platforms that promote social interactions and online forums designed to facilitate information sharing.
Integrating the findings into our app
We discovered platforms with networking and relationship-building functionalities are often exclusive and extremely regulated. Q&A-style apps such as Quora are often focused on “distinguished” influencers and renowned experts which deters regular users from answering questions and speaking up.
To lower the barrier to entry and allow all elders to freely speak up about their area of expertise, we have disabled the comment section. The comment section for apps such as Reddit and Quora is dominated by “named” users while newbie comments are often discredited or ignored. We believe the disabling of commenting functionalities shall prompt one-on-one communication between question-askers and answerers, which can alleviate senior loneliness and lead to the formation of fruitful online relationships.
Synthesizing interviews, competing apps, and pain points
By synthesizing these research results, we came up with a list of insights to integrate into our designs.
Defining what we’re solving
Socially isolated seniors can utilize online knowledge-exchange platforms to alleviate loneliness and boost self-confidence by sharing their knowledge with the younger generation.
Mobile knowledge-exchange services
Usability & Accessibility barriers for existing apps
Embarrassment in asking for assistance during digital exploration
Hinders seniors from participating in any form of digital exploration.
However, the lack of:
Sketching out solution spaces
Based on our solution statement, we started sketching out a few design concepts that could help alleviate senior loneliness, lack of confidence in utilizing mobile devices, and inability to form lasting relationships with new people.
Aligning our app with HCI values
We made sure to take User Experience Dimensions into account whilst scoping out our project by touching on how the user interacts with the interface on a sensory level.
We wanted users to feel emotionally empowered and full of confidence whilst using our app, which lead us to enlarge the font size, add conspicuous “help” buttons on every page, and minimize the usage of icons to prevent confusion(for instance, the mental model of what elderly users would associate with the word “phone” might differ heavily compared to current iconography).
Icons are getting flatter, vaguer, harder to understand.
Laying out the floorplan of our solution
To achieve our goal of helping elders form lasting relationships with others and regain a sense of self-worth, we have divided our app into the following 5 sections:
Note: Because we had spent the whole semester researching and not designing, we had to unwillingly choose certain MVP features to focus on and get cracking to submit our project on time. While we ended up choosing the “Home-Question Feed” as our main feature, we hope to someday complete all the pages enlisted in our IA when we get the chance :-)
