Designing for an active retirement— a design sprint

💡 How might we empower elderly retirees to participate in skill sharing to stay active during retirement?

Challenge

For many, the allure of retirement is fabled in time with grandkids, travelling, and being free to do whatever one wishes. But the reality for many is that retirement can bring on depression from being socially inactive, having a sedentary lifestyle and a lack of purpose, which leads to poor health outcomes.

Role

I worked in a multidisciplinary team of MA students from The Royal College of Arts’ IDE programme. Amongst our team was an architect from Japan, an engineer from Jamaica and another from Turkey, and a programmer from China.

Since I was the only UX designer, I led the research activities; collected qualitative data, conducted site visits to immerse the team in the life of the senior citizens in Singapore, facilitated brainstorming sessions, led a design clinic workshop, and created layouts for presentation decks.

Our objective: To support elderly retirees in having an active reitrement in Singapore.

Timeframe

This project was a 5-day design sprint. 🏃

Discovery

We spoke to community groups and organisations that worked closely with the senior citizens such as The Cassia Resettlement Team, which regularly hosts activities with the senior citizens in Cassia Crescent. They also connected us with some of their senior citizen residents for us to conduct in-depth interviews with.

In total, we spoke to 8 senior citizens from the age of 65–72 to understand:

1. What does an active retirement look like to senior citizens?
2. How do senior citizens stay active in their retirement?
3. What would make persuing an active retirement more fufilling?

Key findings

Our findings indicated that to senior citizens in Singapore, a meaningful retirement is one where they can remain active contributors to society through work. However, their reasons for working and ideas of work were very different from how we ourselves looked at work.

• Senior citizens see as active retirement as one where they are able to continue working as a way to stay active — physically, mentally and socially
  We quickly learnt even in retirement, many senior citizens still wanted to keep working. To them, work is less about earning money and more an outlet to keep active and maintain a social circle.

“After a certain age, you tend to lose your friends. Working with other old folks gives me the opportunity to make new ones.”

“Old people like us must move about. When you stay at home your brain will start to forget things.”

Mdm Lai and Mdm Hong met through their jobs and have become good friends

• While many senior citizens still wish to work during retirement, they want to have flexible hours due to physical limitations and health
  Many prefer not to work full time, rather preferring to have the ability to be flexible and work when they wish to, in order to take care of their health. However, jobs offering such flexibility are hard to come by.

Mr Cai is looking for a job that will allow him to work flexible hours due to his knee injury

• Many jobs available to senior citizens are typically ‘low skilled’ jobs, although many seniors possess knowledge and expertise at a higher capacity, which they are happy to share but have few opportunities to do so

“The teacher at the community centre taught us how to make popiah. Actually I already know how to make…and I think mine is better so during the class I kept showing people my technique instead!”

“Actually us old folks, we know a lot. When I get to teach my children or grandchildren how to do things, I feel so happy.”

Ideation

After a very eye-opening round of interviews, we came together to put together our insights gathered from our interviews. We then used this to guide our brainstorming and ideation session.

As we were mapping our findings and brainstorming solutions, we had an idea:

“What if we could have elderly freelancers?”

We selected this idea because it would allow our senior citizen users to:

• Keep working in retirement
• Work with flexible hours
• Find fulfilment and purpose in sharing their skills or learning new things

Through this we created a way for senior citizens to engage with their community by contributing their skills or learning from others, bringing people together across age groups and giving work a new meaning.

We quickly prototyped an app to test the concept. We decided to call it SUKA SUKA — a Singlish term meaning anything, anytime.

The Concept

SUKA SUKA is a platform that connects a party that needs help, to a party that can offer help. It encourages social interaction and friendships between people that have spare time and willing to share.

Our findings during this project suggest that many senior citizens are looking for ways to continue contributing to society after retirement, without the need for fixed commitments.

While the decentralisation of work and the rise of the freelance model are already working to make the traditional retirement less necessary and desirable, we believe it is also leading to a more social and interactive future as well. SUKA SUKA is a complementary platform to this future, allowing people to participate free of obligation and engage in part-time fun and assistance.

Our first prototype

The platform would allow users to put up requests to learn certain skills, and connect you with another party that was would be able to teach it. After the transaction was completed, score points that would allow them to redeem rewards in the local hawker centres. We did this to incentivise more people to connect with senior citizens in their area.

We brought our prototype out to the field and showed it to users to gather feedback.

Guerrilla testing

We wanted to understand how senior citizens would take to our app and establish any design changes that needed to be made for an improved UX. So we took to the streets and hung around coffee shops to look for senior citizens to test our product.

Testing and iterating our product

The good

• The senior citizens showed excitement over being able to share their skills and were appreciative of the idea
• Many shared that the interface was simple enough to figure out (although they would have liked it to be available in other languages)

The bad

• Although they liked the concept, it took them a while to warm up to using the app itself. It was only after some demonstration from our team that they felt confident enough to try using it
• The senior citizens possessed a varied aptitude with smartphone apps, suggesting that there be an alternative manner of joining the community for people who were less tech-savvy
• They also expressed concern about letting strangers into their home when meeting them to exchange skills
• They added that the calendar feature needed to be more prominent so that they know what they have agreed to, and so that they don’t forget

Design changes

To address the problems we uncovered, we made the following adjustments:

• We added a physical terminal to the design, like a notice board that would be installed in coffee shops, community centres and other places that senior citizens frequent. So that less tech-savvy senior citizens will still able to participate
• Would tap onto public spaces like community centres or dedicated tables within coffee shops for the users to meet up, instead of at their own homes
• We moved the calendar/schedule feature onto the main page so that it made the representation of commitments clearer

Storyboard of how the physical terminal and the app integrate

Visualisation of the concept

Concluding thoughts for further refinement

Designing for inclusivity is key — the solution must be designed in such a way that a user from any income, age and skill set as well of relatively healthy and able-bodied can use it with ease. It should also take into account the local community of the users and ensure that it is capable of strengthening the community as a whole, rather than prioritising certain subsets of individuals.

It is important that the concept be developed further to ensure that people don’t view skills outside of those traditionally outside of the standard working world as irrelevant. Developing the community to view all skills no matter how inane as valuable could be of tremendous value to the concept.

Reflection

This was a very heartening project to be a part of. Our senior citizen users from the interviews and workshops felt listened to, and they felt good about helping other users like them. Through this project, I learned a lot in terms of research and design. Specifically, how to conduct interviews and usability tests with users whom I may not be as familiar designing for, as well as accounting for different accessibility needs. Not to mention, this project also helped me brush up on my mandarin speaking skills!

Thanks for reading!

I hope this was useful to you and if you have any thoughts about the project or have any feedback to share, I’d love to hear from you at shainaatan@gmail.com.