Helping Seniors Living Alone

Contributors: Paari Gopal, Wednesday Wolf, Marlena Rehder, Morgan Graham

Problem and Solution Overview

As we age, it becomes more difficult to perform certain tasks. Vacuuming the house or hanging a picture frame can be difficult. While many elderly people live with family members who take care of them, stay in elderly homes, or have long-term caregivers, there are also many seniors who live on their own. While seniors can generally take care of themselves, they often have nobody to reach out to when these small tasks arise. Our solution will connect elderly individuals (aged 65+) who live alone in King County, WA to individuals who can help them with these small tasks so they can maintain their independence. They will be able to schedule times to get help from a series of small tasks and choose which helpers they would like help from and at what frequency. These elderly individuals living alone don’t have access to the same physical support that elderly people living in other communities do, despite facing the same mobility issues so our solution would help decrease the equity gap between these groups.

Design Research Goals, Stakeholders, and Participants

Our research included two different stages of research: surveys, then interviews combined with directed storytelling. Due to the pandemic, there were extra obstacles. The ways we contacted our participants and conducted our research had to be virtual. Especially with the elderly population, we do not want to put anyone at risk for our research. To contact our participants, we released a survey on Nextdoor which consists of a series of questions that ask individuals aged 65+ living alone in the King County area about their technological preferences, their experiences with household tasks and getting help, and their current living situations. In our survey, we also asked individuals to schedule interviews with us if they are interested in giving more in-depth answers as part of our research. Our survey was released on the online neighborhood platform Nextdoor in two different communities in the King County area and to friends of group members who fit the age and location criteria. In total, we received 26 survey responses and conducted 8 interviews.

Design Research Results and Themes

From our interviews and survey responses, several themes emerged:

Lack of comfort with Video Chat

⅓ of respondents mentioned that they don’t like using Zoom which makes them feel less connected to groups that they used to (Figure 1 below). One interview respondent further echoed that sentiment by mentioning how it felt “weird” and another mentioned how it was annoying for having group conversations due to people talking over each other. When we design our solution, we will need to make sure we design in a way that avoids video chat to prevent our users from getting frustrated.

Many individuals don’t realize they need/receive help

The majority of interview participants stated that they did not need any outside assistance when asked “Do you currently access any outside help/services?” but after probing and asking other related questions, we discovered that they do get some sort of outside help be it from family members or for smaller things they didn’t realize they actually accessed. This is further supported by survey data that demonstrates how over 80% of individuals surveyed needed some help in the last year (Figure 2 below). This means that when we design our solution, we need to ensure that we build a solution that helps our target audience without necessarily directly pointing out the fact they need help or can’t perform certain tasks on their own. In a sense, we need to make sure we fulfill their needs without insulting their independence.

Physical tasks are more difficult than mental tasks

Over half of respondents stated they need some help with yardwork, almost half said they needed help with household tasks, and over ⅓ stated they need at least some assistance with cleaning (Figure 3 below). These are all tasks that have a reasonable physical demand as they require extensive movement throughout/around the house. In contrast, other tasks like operating a computer, reading/writing, and getting items at the store, had a very low number of respondents requiring assistance (Figure 3 below). These tasks all require more mental capacity than physical capacity. This means that when we design our solution, we should make sure that we focus on providing assistance for physical tasks rather than mental ones, as these are the ones that tend to cause our user group the most trouble due to their age.

Design Ideation

Our team went through multiple ideas when trying to come up with a design that would fulfill our users’ needs and tasks. We wanted to solve six basic tasks: washing dishes, driving, getting help and recommendations from a 3rd party website, cleaning a house, ladder-based tasks, and moving a sofa. Here are a few of the proposed solutions that we came up with.

Proposed Design

While we will use design elements from the mockups shown above (Figure 5), we will turn this design from a mobile interface to a website accessible on all technological devices with internet access but optimized for use on a computer. This design is clean, simple, and easy to use. It clearly outlines the tasks that are being supported, makes it easy to schedule appointments, and provides a clean interface for viewing helper ratings and reviews. The text is also fairly large making it easy to read.

We selected this design as it is most in line with the information gathered during our design research. From our interviews, we learned that money is a concern for many seniors. Many of them live off Social Security and have to be economical with their purchases. Building a website would help them stay in-line with their frugal lifestyle as a website can be accessed on all technological devices (computer, phone, tablet), of which all interviewees had at least one. Our data show that 95% of users stated that a website on the computer was either their favorite technology or they were comfortable with it, while only 30% of respondents preferred using accessing a website through their phone. As such, by building a website we remain accessible to those who only own phones (like some of our interviewees), but also build in a way that leverages the technology that most elderly feel comfortable with. Furthermore, we went with a website optimized for computers as other technological mediums had much higher rates of dissatisfaction. For example, over nine out of 26 respondents did not prefer a phone app and almost 40% of respondents did not prefer video chat.

Below are our storyboards for our solution. Figure 6 below shows a senior woman getting help moving a sofa. For many seniors, trying to move large heavy objects could cause injury, so getting help to complete this task is very important. Compared to the other tasks, this task is one of the most common, and has one of the larger risks of injury. Using our service gives this woman the freedom to complete tasks without risk. Our second storyboard, Figure 7 below, shows a woman’s experience with the website as she gets help doing yardwork. This shows how simple it is to use our website.