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Bonding Book
Deepening the social connections of older adults to improve their mental wellbeing
Overview
One of the biggest problems found when looking into the space of older adults (aged 55+) and mental health is the need for stronger connections amongst their social networks (their friends and families)
Ideally, older adults want to maintain these relationships however the shallow nature of social media does not allow for a catered nor visualized approach in communication to which appeals to the audience of older people. As such, the challenge of it can be seen below:
“How might we develop a deepened communication medium that caters to the needs of older adults?”
My contribution
Product strategy User research Product design
The team
3 x UI/UX Designers
Year
2023
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Primary Research
An important stage at this point was researching the target audience of older adults and getting to know their experiences, behaviors and such in the online landscape of communication platforms.
To do this, I conducted online ethnography, surveys and user interviews to grasp a holistic understanding of the problem and audience at hand. Before that I also kept in mind 5 research questions (RQ) that were segmented and targeted with the 3 research methodology/triangulation to make sure the questions I had were addressed. These research questions included:
- What digital platforms do older adults currently use to communicate with friends/family?
- What barriers do older adults experience on the digital landscape?
- What mental health problems can occur with a lack of technological accessibility? How severe are they?
- How can better technological accessibility benefit one’s mental health?
- What factors affect how often older adults are able to stay in contact with their friends and family?
Online Ethnography
I conducted online ethnography as a means to understand the behaviors of older adults and the barriers/issues they faced on online platforms. I used Reddit to understand such personal experiences on a deeper level through personal engagement on the sub-reddit:r/askoldpeople where I posted a question to target research question 5
User Surveys
Surveys quickly were released following conducting online ethnography; with a total of 21 responses showcasing interesting findings. These findings included: the average rate of satisfaction of keeping in touch with friends/family decrease amongst ages, 81% of adults prefer phone calls as the main source of communication and 42.9% of adults stay in touch with friends/family many times a week
User Interviews
I interviewed a total of 12 participants; asking questions about their digital platform usage and problems associated with a lack of social connections kept amongst their friends and family.
User Insights
Doing all of this user research uncovered 4 key themes:
Bonding Book
Bonding Book is a digital scrapbook device (proposed technology of digital pages with scrapbook and NFC elements whereby NFC allows users to scan in their photos into our device) that focuses on bonding through creating shared memories and using visualized nodes to represent the connections between a user and their social networks (friends and family).
Users are able to deepen such relationships through features such as scrapbooking and video-calling to see their relationship progress and strengthen overtime; all under their control.
Storyboard Journey
To understand how Bonding Book works contextually, a storyboard was done showing the journey of how an older adult user would use it to improve their relationships with their friend
Paper Prototypes
Once the idea was developed, we went straight into paper prototypes. In particular, however, a scrapbook-like physical product was made to represent the type of device older adults would be using. This helped to situate our user testings to be more catered to the type of end-product we envisioned for, and helped us plot out how our screens would look as well
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Low-Fidelity Prototypes
For our low-fidelity prototypes, Figma was used to represent our screens onto a digital platform. Due to the major amounts of screens developed - this was the main wireflow representing the key elements of our concept (ideas refined and brought over from our paper prototype screens)
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High-Fidelity Prototypes
It was during the high-fidelity stages that a key change with our visual theme was made to fully enhance and connect everything we discovered in our research and overall problem together.We changed the use of “nodes” to represent relationships from our low-fidelity prototypes (circles with profile images) into the pastel idea of flowers and forestry (trees, roots etc).
The “why” for this was because it better represented the idea of creativity, scrapbooking and nostalgia that catered to the audience of older adults, a direct relation to the problem statement we were trying to address from the beginning.
Below is a progress in screens from low to high-fidelity
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Final Prototype
Project Learnings
1) Organization of documentation
It was through this project that the importance of organizing documents was clearly made important. This involved the proper document organization of our project process onto something like a Google Drive, as it was hard at times to find particular sections needed (such as photos or user feedbacks); due to the unorganized amount of documents and aspects that were left hanging.
2) Managing time on core features
Another big learning was spending time on the main features of our design, rather than spending unnecessary time trying to fix the beginning NFC setup stages of our app. This in turn, made me and my team truly lose sight towards what we were designing for in the first place.
3) Keeping focus on the problem at hand
The final yet most important lesson was ensuring that our design was grounded back to the main problem at hand that was meaningful to our target audience of older adults; and to not add concepts that do not add any value or are too complex for us to fix.
This was particularly seen when we figured out to use the metaphor of pastel flowers and scrapbooking to address the missing element of relatability with our target audience of older adults. A core change in our final prototype that added so much value in following through with our project vision of older adults and fostering relationships.