📓 Meetup Notes: Designing for older adults: What does it mean to you? with Lia Tsotsos
Part 1 of our meetup live-blog from Inclusive UX Research
Starting us off tonight is Lia Tsotsos, Director of the Centre for Elder Research at Sheridan College, who shared three projects they worked on and key takeaways from working with older adults.
- Wise
- Neglected
- Not tech savvy
These portrayals affect how we perceive older adults. Lia’s objectives with her talk was to create awareness about older adult stereotypes and how they impact design and usability studies. She also wanted to share key takeaways and best practices from three projects that she has worked on, to inspire researchers to create more inclusive solutions.
Project 1: A Medication Management App 💊
This goal of this project was to determine the usability and perceptions of the app among community-dwelling older adults and included a strong focus in app onboarding. The participants for this project were generally in good health and open to technology.
The key takeaways Lia shared for this project included:
- Training should be multi-modal, always available and shared. It wasn’t enough to describe things through text, participants also wanted audio and video, and wanted to be able to try things out themselves (ie. practice rounds before moving forward.).
- Within the app, consistency of icons and their placement is paramount. It stood out to participants every time something changed. If they spent the time and effort to learn and understand a design, there has to be a good reason to change it.
- If a feature is described or promised, it needs to be fully formed and thoughtfully designed. Having a concept that was not fully designed was a problem for participants while evaluating the project because they weren’t able to extrapolate what the features would look like. An important thing to note is that their level of familiarity and the assumptions they’re willing to make aren’t the same as a younger cohort. When approaching older adults, you can’t bring something half thought-out or else you won’t get the feedback you’re looking for.
Project 2: Reminiscence Therapy 🖼️
This was a pilot study for a personalized home reminiscence therapy app. Using the tool, caregivers could upload audiovisual content and use it with someone with dementia to help them engage in conversation. For this project, most primary caregivers weren’t familiar with technology.
Key takeaways for this project were:
- Active caregivers have expectations and many commitments; beware when a product falls short or life gets more complicated.
- Consider the importance of a smooth user experience in emotionally charged situations. Be mindful of expectations you’re setting up for this population since they put a lot of time and effort to understand it and also have many commitments. As a result, there should be a payoff at the end. If they don’t have smooth experiences, they’ll be turned off quickly.
- User feedback should inform the feature set, not your personal experience with your grandma. 🙅♀ ️It’s great to be inspired by your experience, but don’t let this narrow your designs. This happens more than we think.
Project 3: Technology and Dignity 🤝
They evaluated a computerized tool that allows cancer patients to assess their symptoms before seeing their clinical care team. This allows doctors to immediately knew how their patients are feeling before even speaking to them. This project explored barriers to technology use and the impact of technology on the daily lives of older adults. It also considered how well theoretical frameworks for dignity in health care describe the need for dignity in technology designed for older adults.
Key takeaways for this project:
- Particularly in health care settings, there is a need to balance the desire for efficient high tech, with the desire for high touch in care situations
- Dignity can be lost or threatened when technology doesn’t work as expected. For example, if an individual can’t figure out a tool, they may have negative thoughts such as, “If I can’t figure this out, everyone in this waiting room will know,” and this will affect their dignity.
- The consideration of dignity issues alongside technology discussions can actually lead to improved healthcare practices. (ie. having a patient sign up with their name rather than signing in with a number humanizes the experience.)
To summarize, Lia’s key messages for researching with and designing for older adults were:
- Solutions should never be half-baked when they’re brought to users — if they are, make it clear what works and what doesn’t because the more they understand your process, the better feedback they can give.
- Just because your grandma liked it, doesn’t mean everyone else will like it‼️
- Consider how technology or interaction maintains the dignity of a user, no matter their situation, condition, or understanding of technology.
Finally, Lia ended her talk with an insightful quote:
“Design for the young and you exclude the old; design for the old and you include everyone.”
- Gerontologist Bernard Isaacs
If you consider aging from the beginning, you are creating something that is more inclusive by default!
Catch up on the other talks from the Inclusive UX Research meetup below 👇
Who is at the table? Co-design methods and learnings — Sepideh Shahi, Cheryl Li and Dana Ayotte
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