Redesigning the Calling Experience

Authors: Amritha Sudarsan, Haritha Malladi, Zahra Dhuliawala

Project Overview and Participant

Who does Apple imagine as their average user when creating their products? Chances are, it isn’t an 87-year-old woman living in an assisted Roman Catholic facility.

As future UX researchers and designers, we did want to see the kind of challenges an older user might have while using what we now consider everyday devices, and how a design solution could address them.

Motivated by our discussions in class surrounding the exclusion of older adults in conventional technology design processes, we conducted an interview followed by a co-design session to solve a problem identified by our participant that might hinder tech usage for other older adults.

Methods

1. Preliminary Interview — Our first interview with the participant was based around understanding the participant's usage of technology and her needs regarding her devices.
2. Co-design Session — Based on our interview with the participant, we mapped out the possible problem spaces and ideated solutions with the participant to address the shortcomings of her device and its applications for her needs. We created low-fidelity prototypes over the course of the session.
3. User Test — Based on the lo-fi prototypes, we generated high-fidelity prototypes that we eventually tested with our participant using a Wizard of Oz technique.

Participant Interview & Insights

Conversing with our participant gave us an insight into her demographics and how she as an individual used her smartphone.

Fig 1. Participant Details

While our participant talked a lot about the issues she faces with her phone, there were two that really stood out to us:

• A guide to tell me what my phone can do, and how to do it: “I don’t even know what I can get out of the phone. And it would be wonderful to know. It would be nice to find somebody that would be able to show me how to do it or get a write-up and I can follow instructions at written instructions. And I think that probably a lot of people could follow.”
• Communicating with loved ones who have technological barriers: “We call like maybe once or twice a week, but a lot of times she can’t hear the phone and she used to have text-ability, but her son decided that since she couldn’t see, so that would be great if she could text if there was some way in spite of she has macular degeneration, the kind that you can’t get the shots for.”

We decided to redesign the calling experience for our participant in a way that would be suitable for communicating with her sister. This not only gave us insights into how existing experiences didn’t cater to our participant’s needs with calling her sister but also taught us about the other side of the technology-savvy spectrum when we look at older adults; Those who are interested in learning but lack the resources to do so. Following our interview, we collected a few insights that could better inform our design direction.

Fig 2. Summary of quotes and design directions

Solution Proposal

Our participant seemed most interested in finding a solution for being able to communicate with her sister, who lives farther away.
For the past 10 years, her sister has been witnessing a decline in her hearing abilities and has been diagnosed with macular degeneration, which makes it difficult for her to notice the phone ringing. Apart from her sister’s requirements, she has also mentioned concerns about not being able to connect with calls through notifications, trouble adding other members to calls, and about requiring everything to be bigger.

With this in mind, we decided that the objective of our project should be to redesign the entire experience of calling, which could be personalized and reflected in the phone of the person she is calling.

We would like to address aspects, such as adding other members and favorite contacts amongst others, that aren’t accessible to her in the way her current phoning application is designed.

Co-design Session & Insights

Goal for the session

• To understand whether a specially designed calling app would help the Participant communicate with her sister (and other family or friends) that she would like to reach.
• What would be the features for the alternative calling app and how would it be different from the pre-existing calling app on her phone?

Method
For the co-design session, the primary method we followed was Likes/Dislikes and Design Ideas.

We started with evaluating the existing calling application on the participant’s phone and categorized the features into ones she liked, disliked and then further went on to brainstorm design ideas.

Conducting this activity with the participant helped us narrow down the major requirements of a calling application, on basis of which, we created rough paper prototypes that helped the participant put her thoughts into a more tangible format.

Creating a rough storyboard helped us ensure we were considering every major step of the calling process:
locating a contact → placing/receiving a call → ongoing call screen

Fig 3. Low-fidelity prototypes created during the co-design session. (L-R: Contact Details; Incoming Call; Ongoing Call; Outgoing Call)

Insights

Our primary takeaway from the co-design session was that we needed a way to trigger sensory feedback beyond the conventions of calling applications to be able to create a more seamless method of communication.

Some of the additional insights were –

• All of the text & interactions needed to be a lot bigger than the default iOS settings.
• Out of the ~300 contacts on her phone, the participant only calls ~10 of them regularly.
• Our participant likes using messaging applications. However, using text was often an issue due to the text sizes and issues with typing.
• The participant expressed wanting the receiver of a phone call to have some indication that ‘someone special’ was calling them.
• Our participant always accessed communication options through her Contacts application.
• She wasn’t used to clearing her tabs as well, which meant she would open applications from the last viewed screen.
• Current iOS calling experiences, such as this screen for receiving a call, made it difficult for our participant to understand how she could reject the call.
• Within the edit mode of contacts, ‘Cancel’ is confusing nomenclature. When in search mode, the ‘+’ icon disappearing threw our participant off.

Solution

Introduction
The outcome of the co-design session was a more solid understanding of the structure of the application and what the major features that do not exist in conventional calling applications would address the major problems faced by the participant.
We ended the session with a rough outline of the application –

• A communication application that focuses on favorite contacts.
• Calling features that trigger sensory feedback such as maximization of volume and flashing lights that make it easier for the receiver of the call to perceive an incoming call.
• An audio-based messaging application that allows the participant to drop her sister a short message without having to call her up.

Prototype

From the insights of our co-design session, we created high-fidelity prototypes of our solution. We proposed a communication app exclusively for frequently contacted or ‘favorite’ contacts. Some of the main features are as follows:

1. Onboarding: The app imports favorite or preferred contacts from the main contact list. The home page provides easy access to frequent contacts.

Fig 4. Initial screens (L-R: Importing favorites from Contacts; Home page with Favorite contacts; Contact information)

2. Messaging: An audio-based messaging feature allowing users to instantly send a message easily. Text messaging is an alternative option.

Fig 5. Messaging feature (L-R: Overview of the messages; audio message recorded; text message; messaging conversation)

3. Calling: A customizable calling feature that provides the option to trigger sensory feedback at the receiver’s end such as maximizing volume, flashing light or increasing vibration.

Fig 6. Calling feature with options to maximize volume, flash lights and increase vibration

Testing Session & Insights

For the testing session with our participant, we conducted a cognitive walkthrough along with Wizard of Oz testing. The participant was first given an introduction to the app and its main features. We then asked the participant to interact with the prototype and voice out their opinions- what they like or dislike about the prototype. To test the calling feature, we used the Wizard of Oz testing to simulate a call.

Overall, we received positive feedback from our participant while testing the prototype. She was impressed with the design solutions we had incorporated in the app. One feature that stood out to her was the option to control volume or flash lights at the receiver’s end. This would greatly improve her communication with her sister as she would be able to notice the ringing phone easily. Since our participant prefers the ease of texting, she particularly liked the simplified messaging feature. Her sister, who has macular degeneration, usually could not read the text properly and message her back. She mentioned how the audio messaging feature will immensely help her in this situation of communicating asynchronously with her sister.

During the testing session, we noticed a slight hesitation in adding favorite contacts to the calling app. They were unaware of how to add a new person to their existing ‘favorite’ contact list and wished to see either a bigger button to add a person or explain the process during onboarding.

Generalizability of the Design & Future Work

We included these design features to enhance the calling experience of our participant. We believe these solutions would help people who wish to stay connected but find it difficult due to the complexities involved while using an advanced technological device.

• We maintained a simple UI with clear user flows for the given features. Hence all the features of the app can be accessed through the bottom navigation bar.
• The smallest font size is 16px, which can be adjusted, to accommodate for better readability and visual comfort.
• Every icon or button is labeled to help interpret the actions correctly. This may also help users with different cultural backgrounds that may not interpret symbols in the same way.

From the testing session, adding a contact to ‘favorites’ is a distinct aspect and there is limited supportive material or guidance to help users in this process. Hence, incorporating a help tool as well as explaining the process during onboarding can help resolve this issue. Additionally, conducting tests with a diverse range of participants can further bring out new insights of the features.

Reflection on Processes

Interviewing, followed by a co-design session and an evaluation session were insightful.

• The initial interview helped us understand the participant’s existing phone behaviors, which gave us insight into the kind of specific accessibility features that would be required.
• Co-designing led by the participant gave us a view into how the user might expect the interface to look and work.
• Evaluating our prototype with our participant revealed gaps in the user’s understanding that we failed to address, to make the next iteration more comprehensive.

One thing that would have better informed our design directions would have been to collaborate more with the other potential users (like our participant’s sister) and involve them in our co-design process. This would have made the entire experience more complete even on the receiving end. Including this would also obviously mean conducting more interviews with the other potential users, which would require more resources.

Challenges

During the Problem Understanding Interview with our participant, we discussed possible directions to explore regarding her struggles with technology. We decided to move forward with the problems she faced while communicating with her sister. While gathering information about this problem space, we later noticed how the participant often tended towards finding a solution for her sister, expressing her point of view. To tackle this, for our co-design session, we structured it in a way that our participant voices out her view and discusses possible solutions to her problem first, eventually helping out her sister as well.

Key Learnings

• Since our participant is an older adult living in an old age home, we had a few assumptions such as trouble using a smartphone or lack of interest or enthusiasm to learn to use technology. However, our participant was a curious person and eager to learn the various capabilities her smartphone offered. The interview process gave an in-depth understanding of getting to know the participant and exploring the unique challenges she faced while using her smartphones.
• It was a great opportunity to learn the process of participatory design. During our co-design session, we gained a better understanding of balancing power dynamics while identifying her pain points and frustrations while communicating with her sister. The co-design session was a fruitful experience to interact with the participant and involve her in the overall design process.

References

Farage, M. A., Miller, K. W., Ajayi, F., & Hutchins, D. (2012). Design principles to accommodate older adults. Global journal of health science, 4(2), 2–25. https://doi.org/10.5539/gjhs.v4n2p2