Vital Docs: An application to aid positive ageing in elderly people

Introduction to the Project

This project was done as an assignment for the subject “Fundamentals of Interaction Design” at UTS. The goal of this project was to create a product that helps with the ‘positive aging’ for elderly people. We tried to enhance the lives of elderly people by focusing on factors like mental and physical health, active social participation, or financial security. To meet these requirements, I worked with my team to create “Vital Docs”.

Vital Docs is a multi-platform application that enables elderly people with mobility issues to communicate and attend their appointment with their doctors virtually. With the help of this app, elderly people won’t have to visit the hospital by themselves or bother anyone else. They can virtually send their vitals such as blood pressure, sugar level, etc. to their doctors and receive feedback without stepping out of their doorstep.

Total Team Members: 5

Duration: 4 months

My Responsibilities: 1 user interview, persona, storyboard, heuristic evaluation, paper prototype, video concept

Design Process

We needed a clear design process in our mind from the beginning of the project to establish an understanding of the deliverables and deadlines. Furthermore, having a list of artifacts we need to make decreased the risk of any fault or failure. The following steps were taken while working on designing this project. We will also have a look at the details of these steps below.

1. User Interviews
2. Affinity Diagram (Ideation)
3. Persona
4. Problem and Future Case Scenarios
5. Storyboard
6. Paper Prototype
7. Design in Action Video

User Interviews

Each member of the team individually conducted interviews with 2 to 3 elderly people to get a richer understanding of their lives, find a problem and solve it with the use of technology. Through the interview, we gathered information on their background, their occupation, and their general interests and hobbies. But the most important part of the interview was to collect information about their health, social life, security. We wanted to know the hopes and desires of them and what they feared. We also gathered data about their familiarity with technology and how they used technology in their day to day life.

Affinity Diagram (Ideation)

After the individual interviews, our team worked together to create an affinity diagram. The use of the affinity diagram made it easier for us to bring together all of our findings; sort, extract, and display data to get a holistic picture of these findings. From this, we discovered that there were a lot of sections where we could make use of technology to improve upon their lives. But one point we got our attention focused on was most of these elderly people were having problems with mobility issues. As they get older, they have to visit their doctor at regular interval. But it was a challenge for them as they could not drive by themselves which made them dependent on someone else to take them. Considering this problem, our team proposed the idea of “Vital Docs".

Persona

The next step in our design process was to create a persona from the problem we selected. Based on the interview, we created David Hill, who is a 75 years old Australian who has mobility issues. He has to visit his doctor weekly to check his blood pressure but he can’t go by himself. He usually depends on his daughter to take him to the doctor. We used this persona throughout the project as a reference for coming up with solutions.

Problem and Future Case Scenario

In this section, we made a problem scenario where we discuss the problem for our persona, David. As we mentioned in the persona, he has to bother his daughter to physically visit his doctor every week. In the problem scenario, we show how this can be troublesome for him as his daughter might not be available all the time. In the future case scenario, David using “Vital Docs” which saves him from the trouble by using the app to virtually connect with the doctor.

Problem Scenario

It’s Friday afternoon and David is at home waiting for his daughter. He needs to visit his doctor once a month for his routine check-up. Due to his mobility issues, David cannot drive and depends on his daughter for most of his daily activities that require traveling. He feels bad that he has to bother his daughter Friya, who is busy with her own work. After waiting for an hour, Friya finally arrives and apologies for being late. She mentions that she had to attend an urgent meeting. David feels guiltier after hearing this from Friya. David arrives at the medical center, one hour late. Upon his arrival, the receptionist notifies David that the doctor had left 20 minutes prior to his arrival. David feels frustrated and anxious. The receptionist suggests David make an appointment for another time. However, he gets more anxious thinking about the journey he has to make to go back to the doctors.

Future Use Scenario

It is 11 am and David is at home watching his favorite TV show. He gets a notification as the sound of a bell on his phone saying that he has an appointment with his doctor in 15 minutes. He just logs in using the MyDoc app on his tablet/laptop/phone and starts having a video call with his doctor at the scheduled time. After a short conversation, the doctor asks David to wrap the MyDoc digital blood pressure meter on his arm. The device is connected to the Wi-Fi and automatically sends the vitals of David to the doctor. The doctor then receives the vitals on his device and analyses the data. He then provides David with necessary feedback about his health and schedules another appointment date for the next check-up. David feels happy that his regular check-up with the doctor went on well and he did not have to leave his house to attend his appointment. Thus, saving time and not having to bother his daughter for the regular check-up with his doctor. He is so relaxed and no more anxious and continues to watch his TV show.

Storyboard

The storyboard is a visual representation of the scenarios we created earlier. Storyboards can be used to better explain the situation by using pictures which does a better job of telling the story by showing the expressions and emotions of David.

Problem Storyboard

Future Storyboard

Paper prototype and Evaluation

Based on the solution that we as a team had come up with, we created paper prototypes. Even though we were working on this project with a team, we had to create a paper prototype individually. The objective of using paper prototypes was to come up with a design solution to for our persona and test its usability with the actual users before we start creating the actual product. But since this project was done during the time of COVID-19, we were not able to test our prototype with the elderly person we interviewed for this project. So we had to test with someone else.

After conducting a paper prototype, we individually carried out a usability evaluation of our paper prototype. This evaluation was based on the 10 usability heuristics defined by Jacob Nielson from NNGroup. You can find the details on Nielson’s 10 Usability Heuristics for interface design from here. The following table is my usability evaluation based on the paper prototype video included above.

Paper Prototype Screens

Design in Action Video

At the end, our team created a video that articulated the problem that needed to be solved and the detail of how the user’s need was supported by our product. Using our storyboard as a guideline, we presented how David’s life used to be before using Vital Docs. In the 2nd part, we show that David’s life is transformed for better when he used the app. He feels more independent and secure as he can meet his doctor by himself without leaving his house.

Since the paper prototype was an individual assignment but the final video was to be done as a team, only one of the paper prototype was to be used as a reference for this video. We decided to use my teammate’s prototype so the design used in this video is not similar to my prototype but the overall agenda is the same.

Conclusion

Since this subject is from the 1st semester and we are doing fundamentals, we didn’t move into high fidelity design of the project. A few high fidelity screens were voluntarily used for the purpose of the video but it was not a mandatory part of the assignment.

The next step for this project would be implementing the changes based on the usability evaluation and move to higher fidelity designing.