Helping Older Adults Join the World of Video Conferencing: Staying simple and straightforward (Part 2)

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

Our team is creating a better video conferencing application for older adults and those with weakened memory or vision. See our first post about our beginning steps for designing for our user group and discovering what they need in technology.

Our team has made exciting progress on our prototype for our app, called Cheers. After some very insightful user testing, the front-end team created a sleek low fidelity prototype featuring the Cheers account set up process, the Cheers settings page, the Cheers video call face with functioning buttons, and the Cheers homepage. We started with a user flow chart, depicting how a user would experience Cheers from the first invitation, through navigating the interface, to inviting other users to join a meeting. Once we solidified each page and every connection, we divided the different segments amongst the team to start designing. Our first step was to make a component library of buttons, fonts, sizes, and colors to unify the preliminary design details between all of the team members. We considered how each persona we created would interact with our interface to stay focused on our goal of creating a usable, learnable, and robust application.

Navigating Cheers

Maxwell, our persona featuring a fictional 70 year old Florida resident originally from Japan who struggles with English, technology, and typing, would begin his experience with Cheers by receiving an email requesting him to set up an account.

The language is simple, descriptive, and succinct in order to be understandable. Maxwell would have the option to navigate the interface in another language if he chose to, but all of the english words on Cheers are designed to be common.

Maxwell would then be met with a homepage where joining the call is the boldest button, followed by the call schedule and the options to create and join a meeting by manually typing in the ID. Joining the scheduled call is showcased as the primary option to limit the need for Maxwell to type by instead providing large, easily navigable buttons.

Upon joining the call, Maxwell is met with a familiar video conferencing interface boasting larger and more descriptive buttons. We have simplified the zoom menu to show only the most essential features. In addition to the leave call, mute/unmute, and video on/off buttons, we have kept the speaker and gallery view options since, older adults said they enjoy switching their views during our interviews. We have also included the screen sharing option, which is extremely helpful when our users need other technology assistance from experts outside of their home. A user who encounters an unfamiliar warning pop up on her computer can call her son and share her screen. Her son can now identify the exact issue and help walk his mother through the solution.

From the home page, Maxwell is also able to investigate the settings options that we designed to be as non-threatening as possible after noticing a common theme of hesitation towards settings in our user testing. The options for automation eliminate unnecessary pop up screens upon entering calls and also provide personalization. By adding a “More Settings” tab, the initial options are limited to make for afor more a simpler, less overwhelming settings experience.

App Progress

Cheers will initially launch on Windows. Building off of Zoom’s REST API, Cheers will enable users to connect with family and friends running Zoom and other Zoom-based apps.

We’re redesigning Zoom’s Windows demo app to incorporate Cheer’s specific features while simplifying Zoom’s complicated interactions.

Going forward, our goals are to:

• Automate the API authentication process that gives Cheers access to Zoom’s native features and videoconferencing capabilities
• Create a system to guide new users through the Zoom account creation process
• Design a in-app calendar that will fetch and display upcoming meetings
• Add additional features including language support and closed captioning

User Testing

We conducted three user tests with our low fidelity prototype to get some preliminary feedback. We met with three older adults in Ann Arbor of various ages and technology proficiency. Our first participant was 68 years old and felt somewhat comfortable with Zoom. She had used zoom to set up meetings with friends and co-workers, but she did not know how to use most features.

Our second participant was 74, and was much less comfortable with Zoom and other video conferencing platforms. She only joined meetings without an account and had little interest creating her own account since she felt that the action of setting up a meeting was too troublesome, she only felt comfortable joining existing meetings.

Our third participant was 88, and felt the most unfamiliar with any form of video conferencing. We asked him some preliminary questions, but when we started the prototype walkthrough, he struggled to load the figma prototype since his internet crashed. Unfortunately, we were unable to continue the test, but he was more than happy to set up a follow up meeting to attempt the test again.

Although our recruitment process for test participants was blind, all of our participants had PC laptops and iPhones. They all had some familiarity with Zoom but were very interested in using a simplified version with less confusing features. They were comfortable with joining a meeting through an email invitation too.

Key findings from our user testing

Simplicity in Navigation Menu

• Overall, our participants found our navigation menu extremely easy to use. They enjoyed the large buttons, large text size, and intuitive iconography. Our low fidelity wireframe has almost no color or complexity, and our participants loved the simplicity of the UI elements.

Overwhelming Settings Page

• Our settings page was slightly overwhelming for some of our participants. We have added more organizational hierarchy to reduce the complexity of the interface, which we received positive feedback for after a later review.

Intuitive messaging

• Users felt more comfortable clicking through buttons and pages with more descriptive title text. Instead of buttons that said “back” they felt more comfortable selecting buttons that said “back to home”.

Next Steps

After our second design review, we received a lot of constructive feedback that we are really excited to implement in these coming months. Our next steps are geared towards focusing on the smaller details of our design and creating higher fidelity prototypes to truly model the trajectory of our final product. We are looking forward to diving deeper into the details of the design and conducting more user testing to make our interface maximally accessible.