LIFE ALERT: Redesigning their digital solution
PROBLEM: Our challenge was to redesign Life Alert’ s digital offerings to improve conditions for the end user, their family, the paramedics, and the Life Alert staff who interface with all three.
SOLUTION: Research revealed the experience suffered due to the senior user and their family having poor understanding of what exactly happens when the button is pressed. Our solution was to create a contact management app for the members and their family and adding individual contact shortcuts to the end users app.
Life Alert ties together a complex system including the elderly user, their family, and emergency personnel.
We performed our research cautiously and methodically because we had very little prior knowledge on the subject of emergency alert devices.
The first question we asked ourselves was: what is life alert and how does it work? The below illustrates the complete user journey from ordering the the device to signaling an alert.
We gathered feedback from 28 subjects in a mix of long form and survey responses. Eventually we got a good grasp of the major pain points related to users and their families.
- It’s discouraging to not know who will be called through the device.
- There was no quick way to check or change the contact preferences set on the device.
- Their is a wide spectrum of emergent events however the Life Alert’s response procedure lacks appropriate nuance.
In order to understand the barriers that prevented the user from fully engaging with the product we devised some exercises to examine the elderly user and the caretaker psychology at different stages in the product lifecycle.
Using the contact management app, family member and the senior user can easily view and update their settings so they’re unsure about what ‘pressing the button’ will do.
Users also define contacts for emergency and non emergency situations. This helps Life Alert staff properly triage the call to emergency personnel or family members based on the urgency.
Notifications
The caretaker can review the a history of recent times the elderly user engaged with the device. The caretaker receives a notification on their phone if the user presses the button.
Elderly User app
Given the demographic and context of the use of the app, we placed an emphasis on simplicity.
The primary purpose of the app is to give elderly users a secondary way to signal a distress call to Life Alert. It also features simple shortcuts to reach non emergency contacts to support different degrees of urgency.
