Helping Older Adults Join the World of Video Conferencing: Designing for Equity
By Cheers: Alexandra Lepore, Amareesa Robinson, Annie Zhou, Claire Yang, Emily Holtz, Loren Jacobs, Mariyah Kapuswala, Tejaswini Srinivas Reddy, Molly Wu, Matthew Lin, Ria Shah
Cheers is here to make the internet a more inclusive place for senior citizens as well as those with memory loss, visual impairments and digital unfamiliarity. We are working with Geriatrics practitioners, independent computer educators, and local senior centers for expert design feedback and user testing.
Our Problem:
Older adults are unfamiliar with the internet and have difficulty navigating multi-step interactions while using technology which makes it difficult for them to participate in video conferencing. Our goal is to enable older individuals to utilize video conferencing, feel comfortable using it, and remain connected with family and friends.
Community Partners
“The less features the better! The more features you add, the more people you leave behind” -James Giordani
Our Solution:
First, we determined our target user: someone who is 70–85 years old that is visually impaired and may have limited vocabulary.
We started by conducting market and industry research into products that align with the needs we’ve discovered and did a critical analysis of the Zoom video platform to understand what its strengths and weaknesses are in terms of accessibility. We also have spoken with a few community partners who are involved in creating accessible solutions for older clients and using their insights, we have decided to design an application that will allow older adults to video conference using Zoom.
Below is an example of one of the plug-ins we reviewed as part of our market research:
We will be using an API to create a new version of Zoom, maintaining a lot of the existing functionality while emphasizing certain features to increase visibility and overall flow. We want to redesign the Zoom interface to be more compatible with older adults by eliminating some of the more complicated and less necessary functions, replacing a lot of the technical jargon, and enlarging the remaining buttons. There will also be a zoom button guide available that will provide the user’s with clear descriptions of all of the buttons and their functions.
Our new design will follow a simple left to right top to bottom structure with a lot of contrast to make sure everything is clearly legible. We will also incorporate a zoom meeting schedule that will inform the user of any upcoming or current video conferences. All of the invitations to set up a zoom account or join a meeting will be sent through email. From there, the users will be able to select clear buttons that will allow them to join the meeting.
Design Review Feedback
Our community partners stressed to us the need for our design to follow a left to right top to bottom format, similar to that of a book. This format is most consistent with what our target audience is most comfortable with, and follows how they will see the screen, first looking at the top left hand corner. This is why we decided to put all out of key buttons / features on the top of the screen, left to right, because it is the first place that their eyes go. All of our designs are very simple because too much information on one screen can feel overwhelming to a lot of older adults. Additionally, we will be focusing on maintaining large font sizes, contrast, and clear color options so ensure that everything is visible.
What we learned from our design review & future goals:
After our first design review, we learned that we need to come up with a concrete system for obtaining user feedback before we get too heavy into creating the product. Our community partner suggested that we should figure out metrics for how we know our product is working and be sure to collect lots of data and feedback while we work. We also were suggested by our community partner to work on language support for users who may not know English. Our goals for the second design review are to understand more about how the API works and what functionality we should keep and get rid of.
We’re in the middle of user testing!
We are currently conducting remote user testing with older adults in our Ann Arbor community with members of a wellness senior center. We are sharing a working interactive prototype with them while they explore the app and complete tasks under our instruction.
