Interview about Funaging Elderly Educational Service, winner of the A' Meta, Strategic and Service Design Award 2023
FunAging is an educational service offering classes of smartphone apps to accompany and empower the elderly. FunAging disseminates the class information with the elderly via Line, a widely used social app in Taiwan among the elderly. However, many elderly have difficulties in registering classes via Line as its interface is not elderly-friendly. This project employs senior-centered service design thinking to enhance the class registration process. A set of systematic design diagnosis clarifies the UX issues, with insightful design deliverables, to make the service more fluent and effective.
View detailed images, specifications, and award details on A' Design Award & Competition website.
View Design DetailsThe key to our success was continuous user testing on-site, allowing us to gain direct feedback from elderly users. By observing and learning from their interactions, we identified areas for simple design adjustments that had a significant impact. This iterative process of testing, engaging with users, and applying their feedback led to a dramatic reduction in assistance calls—from 20% to 0%. It demonstrated how minor yet thoughtful tweaks can greatly enhance the user experience.
Design thrives under constraints—it is through these limitations that creative solutions are born. When working with the LINE app's platform constraints, I first sought to fully understand the limitations, such as its operational and message interface capabilities. This allowed me to identify specific challenges for readability and user comprehension among elderly users. From there, I focused on creating design adjustments that simplified navigation and emphasized clear, accessible communication. By tailoring content presentation to the platform's strengths and limitations, we managed to enhance user comprehension and usability effectively.
The most critical challenge went beyond the digital medium itself—how to remind elderly users of class schedules when they were not actively using their digital devices. Recognizing that many elderly users enjoy browsing through photos on their phones, we leveraged this habit by creating visual reminder cards stored in their photo galleries, serving as subtle cues whenever they viewed their photos. However, we also knew this couldn't fully replace automated reminders, so we complemented it with manual phone call reminders from the operations team. This dual-confirmation approach effectively addressed their cognitive needs, ensuring they could remember and attend their scheduled classes.
The inspiration for the pictorial card system stemmed from observing elderly users’ strong connection with visual content. Many seniors find it easier to remember and engage with images compared to text-heavy formats. By creating a system of pictorial cards for tracking their class registrations, we aimed to provide a tangible and intuitive tool that leveraged their existing habits, such as browsing photos. To ensure practicality and accessibility, we refined the design through extensive user testing. We focused on clear, large visuals with minimal text, ensuring readability and quick recognition. We also considered color contrasts and simplified navigation to accommodate varying levels of eyesight and digital familiarity. Continuous feedback loops allowed us to make necessary adjustments, resulting in a system that was both user-friendly and effective in helping seniors keep track of their classes.
Given Taiwan’s high LINE app adoption rate, Funaging Elderly Educational Service recognized the importance of building on a familiar platform while addressing the specific needs of elderly users. Our approach was to maintain the social connectivity inherent in LINE while enhancing usability for our audience. We achieved this by creating a simplified registration process tailored to elderly users, integrating step-by-step prompts, intuitive buttons, and visual cues within the LINE interface. We also leveraged LINE's group chat and messaging functions to foster a sense of community, allowing seniors to connect with peers, share updates, and ask questions. By aligning with their existing communication habits, we struck a balance between functionality and social engagement, ensuring the platform remained accessible and empowering for all users.
Our systematic design diagnosis for Funaging Elderly Educational Service focused on identifying and transforming touchpoints that posed challenges for elderly users. One notable example was the registration interface, where multiple steps and dense text created confusion and hesitation. By reimagining this touchpoint through an elderly-first lens, we simplified the process into fewer steps, used larger buttons with clear, descriptive icons, and reduced text in favor of visuals. This transformation turned a complex process into a straightforward and visually guided journey.Another critical touchpoint involved class reminders. Initially, digital notifications were ineffective due to the varying tech proficiency of our elderly users. We redesigned this interaction by integrating pictorial cards stored in their photo galleries and manual follow-up calls to reinforce the reminders. These changes turned a frustrating aspect of scheduling into an intuitive, supportive experience tailored to their cognitive preferences, ultimately enhancing both their confidence and engagement.
Throughout the six-month development process for Funaging Elderly Educational Service, we prioritized continuous feedback from elderly users to ensure senior-centered solutions. We adopted an iterative service design thinking approach that began with in-depth user interviews and observations to understand their daily habits, preferences, and challenges. This helped us create initial prototypes tailored to their needs.Next, we organized regular testing sessions, where elderly users interacted with our prototypes in realistic settings. During these sessions, we encouraged open feedback and carefully observed their reactions, usability hurdles, and points of confusion. We then iteratively refined our designs, making adjustments based on their direct input. This cycle of co-creation and testing allowed us to stay closely aligned with their needs, resulting in solutions that were practical, intuitive, and genuinely effective for our senior audience. By engaging elderly users at every stage, we built a service that truly resonated with their experiences and fostered their independence and engagement.
The success of Funaging Elderly Educational Service in eliminating assistance calls offers valuable lessons for the broader development of elderly-focused digital services. Key aspects of our approach—such as user-centric design, intuitive visual cues, and a dual-confirmation mechanism—demonstrate that solutions can be both tailored and scalable. Future developments in this space can benefit from our emphasis on empathy-driven design, which ensures that the unique needs and cognitive abilities of elderly users are considered from the outset. For instance, using simple, visually guided interfaces, incorporating familiar communication tools, and providing consistent human support when needed can enhance both accessibility and user trust. Additionally, our methodology highlights the importance of iterative user feedback loops, enabling continuous improvement and adaptation as user behaviors evolve.These principles can be adapted to various digital services, from healthcare and social networking platforms to e-commerce and education, ensuring that elderly populations remain connected, empowered, and independent in a digital-first world.
The recognition of Funaging Elderly Educational Service with an A' Design Award underscores the power of inclusive design in transforming digital education services. This achievement serves as a tangible example of how thoughtful, user-centered solutions can break down barriers and create meaningful, accessible experiences for elderly users. It validates the importance of designing with empathy and engaging with real user needs to drive impactful outcomes.I envision this recognition inspiring more digital education service providers to prioritize inclusivity in their design processes. By showcasing how seemingly small adjustments—such as visual cues, simplified navigation, and dual-confirmation systems—can lead to remarkable improvements, it can encourage a broader shift toward more compassionate, user-first design practices. This award also opens up dialogue among industry professionals, educators, and designers, fostering collaborative efforts to develop digital solutions that truly cater to diverse user bases, ultimately making digital education more accessible and empowering for everyone, regardless of age or tech familiarity.
One of the most unexpected discoveries during the development of Funaging Elderly Educational Service was the depth of elderly users' attachment to visual memory aids, such as photos, and how this influenced their digital behavior. This insight shaped our approach to accessible service design by demonstrating that elderly users often find visual elements more intuitive and engaging than text-based instructions. By incorporating this understanding, we leveraged familiar visual cues to communicate complex actions, like class registrations and reminders, resulting in a more intuitive and enjoyable experience.Another surprising finding was the variability in tech proficiency and confidence levels among elderly users. While some were comfortable exploring new digital tools, others required significant hand-holding and reassurance. This pushed us to develop dual support mechanisms, combining user-friendly design with human touchpoints for guidance, fostering trust and reducing frustration.These discoveries reaffirmed the importance of empathy, iterative feedback, and designing for real-life contexts, ultimately guiding our inclusive, user-first approach that turned an initial concept into an award-winning service.
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