User Research
Research conducted by our team in order to understand our target audience.
In order to properly cater our app towards a specific user group (users who are 75+ years old), we conducted background research on our users, including their needs, goals, activities and challenges.
From our research, we found that users aged 75 years or older who live independently and struggle with the deterioration of their memory and overall health, typically need ways to keep track of their health symptoms and daily activities to recall for themselves and their healthcare providers.
Oftentimes the users in our user group want to feel that they still have independence and can still do things on their own without help. This way they are able to remain in control of their lives.
Because these users live by themselves, they have many tasks and activities to keep track of such as taking care of their health (appointments, medications, etc) chores, events with friends and family and physical activity (walks, stretching, etc)
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​One of the unique aspects of AgeWell is the ability to record and keep a log of personal health concerns and symptoms. In order to properly integrate this information into our app, understand our user audience and create curated mockups for our user persona and user scenarios, we did research on a few major health concerns we would use to demonstrate these features, such as diabetes (ie. blood sugar and insulin) and dementia.
User Persona
Using our background research, we created a user persona that is representative of a majority of our target audience:
Julie Richards, age 79
Goals and Needs:
Julie doesn’t want to be a burden to her family and wants to feel less dependent on them for help. She wants to be able to keep up with her daily activities as she enjoys being social and seeing her friends and going out for walks occasionally and she wants to be able to do these things without a caretaker or family member with her to help if needed. Julie has issues with her deteriorating vision and hearing and oftentimes has difficulties remembering what she has to do or what she has done due to occasional memory loss.
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Activities:
Julie lives alone and has to take care of herself and her living space, by doing things such as cleaning up and taking her medications. She likes to go out and see her friends at the senior center. She also often has to go out and buy herself groceries or gifts, although sometimes she is able to ask her family to get her groceries. To maintain her health she also goes out on walks for exercise or makes appointments to see her doctor.
Challenges:
In her old age, Julie has issues with her hearing, sight and memory. This makes it difficult for her to see smaller and recognize icons, and hear the audio on her device. It is difficult for her to use platforms such as Instagram or Facebook, as there are many new interfaces and icons that are easy for younger audiences to use and recognize, however, Julie is more comfortable with older design trends and interfaces as they are easier for her to remember. It is also difficult to remember things she has to do or plans she made for herself.