OVERVIEW

Family members and friends caring for a loved one with early signs of dementia are often balancing the need to provide adequate support while also allowing the person to stay independent as long as possible. ELDR is a mobile app that makes it easier for caregivers to communicate with eachother and track the progression of memory loss.

DETAILS

My Role: Research, Project Management, Wireframes

Teammates: Tara Loboda, Clara Kim

Context: Student Project

Skills:

  • User Interviews
  • Storyboarding
  • Wireframes
  • User Flows
  • inVision Prototyping
  • Pitch Presentation

OUR PROCESS

PERSONAS

Our team was provided with three personas representing users and stakeholders of a future technology that would be useful for caregivers of older people in the early stages of dementia. We were tasked with conceiving of a concept and designing the UI for a mobile app that would meet the needs of the personas.

Inez is 75 yrs old and beginning to show signs of dementia. She lives alone and she is comforted by the familiar environment. Inez wants to remain independent and doesn’t realize that she’s starting to show signs of dementia. 

Hector is a longtime family friend of Inez and Rosario. He lives in the same apartment building as Inez and he is able to check in on her regularly. He is happy to help out, but he is also very busy and he doesn’t want caring for her to become his “second job.”

Rosario is Inez’s daughter. She is a real estate agent and lives with her husband and young children. Her busy schedule means she can’t visit Inez as often as she would like, but it is important to her to know how her mother is doing, and when she needs extra care. 
USER INTERVIEWS

We conducted a series of user interviews to validate the needs we identified in the personas. We learned that ineffective communication between multiple, geographically dispersed people who are involved in the care of an elderly individual can make decisions about future care difficult and contentious.


STORY BOARDING

We asked the question: "How can we make life easier for Hector, Rosario and Inez? What are their biggest concerns, and what would a preferred future addressing those concerns look like?"


WIREFRAMES

Focusing on each of these preferred futures, we created wireframes of the two main interactions we envisioned for users of ELDR:

  1. Quickly documenting metrics about Inez's mental state during or after a visit
  2. Tracking and understanding the progress of those metrics over time

INCORPORATING FEEDBACK

We obtained several rounds of feedback from both users and our peers, and continued to iterate on our design.

A consistent point of feedback was that using so many cloud and sun icons caused confusion that the app was about weather. We explored several different sets of icons with the requirement that our choice would have to respect the sensitivity of the context of use. We chose an icon set for each metric that felt both representative of the question and sensitive to our users.

We also learned from our users that caregivers often use casual conversation to make quick assessments about the mental state of the person they care for. We incorporated simple conversation starters into ELDR to integrate this existing behaviour.


FINAL DESIGN