Create and strengthen your relationships.

Ingage

Indigo Design Award 2021

My Role

Research Lead

What I Did

UX Research

User Testing

Type

Group Project

Duration

10 Weeks

Interaction Design

DESIGN CHALLENGE

Fun

Our professor gave us an article to read, Elements of fun in UX, for Human Computer Interaction. This article challenged us to think about what fun really means, and how to integrate fun into a mobile app. In this article there were three main themes: a sense of connection; a thrill of the unknown; and the freedom of choice. Our challenge was to have our app implement these three themes. The result, Ingage, an app that was created for retirees to help them stay active in their community and interact retirees to have a more fulfilling retirement and to stay engaged.

Survey Results

SOLUTION OVERVIEW

Connect, Explore, and Engage

When brainstorming my team decided that we wanted to think out of the box and bring an idea that would be like no other. My team wanted to focus on retirement life and how to help people transition into retirement after working a full-time job for many years. Our target users are between the ages of 60-75. Ingage is an app which helps retirees find volunteer opportunities, connect with people who share common passions, and ultimately build long lasting relationships. To view our entire project click here.

DESIGN PROCESS

01 SECONDARY RESEARCH

First my team conducted Secondary Research to have a better understanding of our target audience (those about to retire and those who are already in retirement between the ages of 60 - 75).

Competitive Analysis:

Point

Find volunteer opportunities near you (offered only in the state of Ohio)

Best UI we found for a community based app
Allows you to follow causes, find events, and meet people through the app
The app is easy to use
Only available to Ohio

02 USER INTERVIEWS

AARP

Focusing on issues affecting those over the age of fifty.

Interest group based
Provides benefits and events (ages 50+)
UI could be improved
Not a lot of community connection

We conducted 14 interviews in our target demographic of 60-75 years old. These interviews helped us gain insights to allow us to have a better understand on what questions to ask in our online survey.

Our Assumptions:

Retirees have a difficult time transitioning into being fully retired
Travel is a large part of retirees plans
Retirees are interested in volunteering

Where we were wrong:

Most retirees thought the transition into retirement was not difficult
Retirees have priorities when traveling
Retirees have had a negative volunteering experience

What we learned:

Retirees want to be involved in their family's lives and within their communities
Retirees want to spend their time doing what they are passionate about
Retirees want to develop relationships with other retirees
Retirees want to feel like they have a purpose

03 ONLINE SURVEY

Using the insights we gained from our interviews, we were able to ask more specific questions that focused on what retirees are most interested in doing during their free time. Our surveys also allowed us to focus on our target users pain points during retirement. From our survey 59% of participants would retire within 5 years and the remaining 41% of our participants were already retired.

Mind Maps helped my group understand how each question related to a specific pain point that we are addressing

In this Mind Map you can see each question we asked in our survey and the options to answers that were presented.

Mind Map:

Topics

End of survey

What is a Mind Map?

Mind Maps are a tool to organize a collection of information that is connected to a single topic.

Findings:

04 AFFINITIZATION

After primary research, we gathered language data (Ideas, Opinions, and Issues) from our interviews and survey and organized them into groups based on their natural relations. The categories shown below have many connections between each other, however, the biggest category that had the most connections was the social category. We found that we could connect social to almost every other category listed.

Passions and Volunteering

Love to have free time
Want to do what they want and when they want to
Flexible schedule

Thoughts: Throughout our surveys we asked what retirees enjoy doing the most in their free time. The most popular answers were volunteering, pursuing personal projects and hobbies, and spending time with family and friends.

Traveling

Traveling is a part of my retirement plan
I did not travel as much as I thought I would
I have priorities when traveling

Thoughts: Many retirees did not travel nearly as much as they thought they were going to due to mostly personal reasons such as, a death in the family, Illness in the family or lack of money.

Retirees that had specific priorities wanted to visit new places, complete things on their bucket list, and see family and friends.

05 HOW MIGHT WE

How Might We questions help us prepare for an innovative solution when approaching the Ideation phase. The How Might We method provides opportunities for new ideas while keeping in mind that there is not yet a solution

06 USER PERSONA

Creating a user persona helps us recognize that different people have different expectations and needs. Doing this can also help us to identify our users' pain points during their journey. Overall they can help us help achieve our goals of creating a good user experience for our target user group of retirees.

07 PROTOTYPING

My team decided that it would make the most sense to jump to a mid-fi prototype because we are focusing on an older demographic (60+). This allows them to not have to imagine interactions, like you would in a low-fi prototype. Doing this also allows us to gain more detailed insights on usability of UI. My team completed an interactive prototype in a rapid time span (2 days).

Mid-Fi User Testing and Feedback:

User Tasks:

Add a volunteering cause and complete the onboarding process.
Search for a volunteer organization through the “search” tab.
Create an event in the “Event” tab by inviting the user and volunteer organization they just followed.
Follow a user from their timeline.
Follow a volunteer organization on the app and view the reviews.
Add another volunteer cause and find a user group involved in that cause.

Questions we asked:

“A tutorial when you first get the app. I just would need to go through it a few times”
“The tutorial or help page with the things identified in a brief description”
“If there is something like a tutorial the first time you used it that would help me”
“If there was a help section where you could see the layout of what things were”

“If your dealing with older people the font could probably be a little bigger.”
“The only thing is making some of the small text a little bit bigger so it’s easier to read for older people”
“I think some of the text was a little bit small and hard to read. I had to zoom in with my phone for some parts.”

“Somewhere that told you what each of the tabs at the bottom are”
“Not knowing what the icons meant at first. I didn't know what they were”
“Icon for Events was confusing. It could be a calendar like icon instead”
“You could also maybe include the name of tabs underneath them in the bottom bar to help out when you are first using the app”

High-Fi User Testing and Feedback:

08 HIGH-FI

After going through our high-fi prototype and user testing we were able to make some final changes to produce our final results, Ingage, a mobile application where retirees can create and strengthen social relationships by finding engaging opportunities they are passionate about locally.

Timeline:

Access help page
View upcoming events
View posts
View volunteer organizations, causes, and passions
Tabs with names on bottom bar

Events:

View upcoming events
Create events
See pending events

Groups:

Follow groups and message leaders
View group events and timeline
View what volunteer, causes/passion groups are involved with

Discounts:

View user reviews of volunteer organizations
Claim senior discounts

Search:

Search for causes, passions, organizations, events, people, and discounts
View suggested posts

VISUAL DESIGN

We played around with which colors to use for our overall theme of our application and decided to use shades of orange. In the app the various shades of orange symbolize if the user is involved with a passion or volunteering. The color Orange symbolizes excitement and enthusiasm. We want our users (retirees) to have these feelings when using our app. We also did not use a true black throughout the app. Using true black can stress users eyes and for our target audience, which is an older demographic, we ensured that the colors would be easy on the eyes. The color Orange symbolizes confidence and communicates the feeling of fun, freedom, and optimism, which are important emotions when creating new relationships.

Colors

#EEB380

#DC645B

#FFFFFF

#F79776

#20212F

Symbolism

JOY

PASSION

Typeface

Avenir

AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJj