Project Background
Today’s technology landscape offers a new and exciting market for mobile health and wellness platforms. The challenge is to create a platform that has value to its users and differs from its competitors. While there are various options of different wellness apps, the scope of this project required us to focus on a minority group within society. For the sake of creating an application that is different and relevant, we decided to focus on elderly people around the age of retirement.
Research
Upon the beginning of the secondary research, our first assumption was that elderly people were lonely after having retired and would therefore experience mental health issues. Subsequently, online research confirmed that elderly people were indeed experiencing an increase in loneliness. According to the source, retired people were missing interaction with others, did not feel heard and felt like they did not contribute to society anymore (Psychiatrist, 2023).
According to a 2016 study by Rico-Uribe (et al.), Europeans are experiencing an exponential increase in loneliness after the age of 65 years, which is usually around the age of retirement.
The Interviews
In order to confirm our research findings, we proceeded to conduct 7 qualitative interviews with interviewee ages ranging from 65 to 77. All interviewees had already retired, were based in Europe and had a mobile phone with at least one social media app on it. These were all requirements for our target group. Contrary to our research findings and to our surprise the interviewees actually revealed that they “loved retiring” and that it felt like “a renewal in life”. Thus, all of the interviewees were really happy with retirement and very far from lonely.
However, after clustering the interview insights and creating an affinity diagram, the data did reveal one significant trend. While all interviewees were thoroughly enjoying retirement, most of them indicated that they were worried about retirement before it happened. With this insight in mind, we conducted a second round of interviews with the same people to understand more about the pre-retirement worries. The second round of interviews showed that all interviewees were indeed anxious to retire at first because they didn’t know what to do with their time and weren’t able to find suitable information about retirement online.
User Persona
Based on the results of our interviews we were able to craft a user persona, who represents the primary user of our final app. Dominique is 60 years old, which brings her close enough to the retirement age to start thinking about this new phase in her life. She is looking forward to retirement but does not know what to expect, which makes her anxious. Ultimately, this scenario brought us to the question of ‘how might we help Dominique feel prepared for retirement?’
Problem and Solution
Established upon the research and interviews, we defined the problem as follows: “senior employees need to find a way to feel prepared for their retirement because the transition into retirement makes them concerned about their future.”
With the problem in mind, we began the ideation process and landed on a couple of key components we wanted included into the final design. Important features were a mood tracker, a form of community and articles about retirement.
All of the features made it into the lo-fi wireframe and ultimately into the mid-fi prototype as well. However, after some testing, the mid-fi was still in need of some improvements. The screens were looking clustered, overwhelming and not quite aesthetically pleasing.
The Final Prototype
After adjusting the mid-fi based on the feedback we received, it was time to start the design of the hi-fi prototype. In order to find the final design for Goldy, we created the brand attributes to be able to define the style. The attributes are: blooming, connecting, helpful, friendly and fun. While the app is supposed to have an educational aspect, it was important to us to keep it young and fun to make sure that the seniors were excited for the new phase in their life.
Considering this sentiment, we created our style tile (as seen above), which incorporates serious but vibrant colours, easy to read text and a fun appearance. Also, an important detail, we tested all colours, features and text for accessibility to make sure especially elderly people were able to read everything. And finally we arrived at the final design and hi-fi prototype:
Final thoughts
Finally, there are some important takeaways and learnings from this project. The project really showed all of us the importance of going beyond first assumptions in order to understand the user. Further, keeping accessibility in mind will ultimately lead to an even better and more comprehensive design.
Here the final prototype to test out:
