Rezylle Milallos | UX Researcher
Gen2Gen Connect
Gen2Gen offers older adults and their families an all-in-one solution to connect and interact with one another. Unlike our competitors, it is designed for ease-of-use and accessibility for older adults. It provides online solutions like technical support and cloud storage for the family, as well as guided in person activities such as synced calendars for local events and travel. This is a summer-long project under the guidance of the Gen2Gen Connect founders, our coach, and the rest of the RIT Innovation Fellows Team.
Skills: Customer Discovery (Interviews), Personas, Prototyping
Collaborators: Adrian Edwards, Dhruvesh Patel, Eric Chen, Liza Savage-Katz (coach), Carol Wittmeyer (founder), and Ann Rollo (founder)
Skills: Customer Discovery (Interviews), Personas, Prototyping
Collaborators: Adrian Edwards, Dhruvesh Patel, Eric Chen, Liza Savage-Katz (coach), Carol Wittmeyer (founder), and Ann Rollo (founder)
Problem Description
Technology evolves rapidly and is not designed for use by older adults (65+ years old). Due to this inaccessibility, older adults sometimes have a hard time connecting with their families, especially with the younger, tech-savvy generations.
A study by the University of California in San Francisco explains that over 40% of older adult regularly experience loneliness. Being lonely and disconnected can increase the likelihood of mortality and promote cognitive decline in older adults. With this in mind, we want to create a user-friendly approach that will promote intergenerational communication between families and help decrease the feelings of loneliness and isolation from the older adults.
A study by the University of California in San Francisco explains that over 40% of older adult regularly experience loneliness. Being lonely and disconnected can increase the likelihood of mortality and promote cognitive decline in older adults. With this in mind, we want to create a user-friendly approach that will promote intergenerational communication between families and help decrease the feelings of loneliness and isolation from the older adults.
Current Play Options
To learn more about the problem, we spoke with our coach and client expert and researched currently-available outdoor playgrounds as well as an indoor play area local in Rochester, The Strong National Museum of Play. We found that lot of current playgrounds focus on large play structures that are inaccessible. Some of them include slides, seesaws, roundabouts, climbing structures, and stepping stones. While there are also interactive activity panels, they often come with painted or printed pictures that are not tactile and can fade away in time.
We also found that small changes can be added to current museum installations that will make them more accessible for youth with disabilities. These changes include:
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Persona
After conducting some background research, we developed a primary persona to help us with the design moving forward.
Lily is a 10-year old wheelchair user who loves going outside and playing with her friends. She also enjoys puzzles and mentally stimulating games whenever she needs to take a break from being active. She gets frustrated when she can't join her friends in certain play structures like the swing or slide.
Lily is a 10-year old wheelchair user who loves going outside and playing with her friends. She also enjoys puzzles and mentally stimulating games whenever she needs to take a break from being active. She gets frustrated when she can't join her friends in certain play structures like the swing or slide.
Design Considerations
Stimulating
- The game must maintain its replay value no matter how many times the user interacts with the structure
- Kids should be enticed to play even from afar
- The installment must promote curiosity and be engaging
- Materials should be safe, reliable, and accessible for both indoor and outdoor play
- Collaboration and interaction among kids of different abilities must be encouraged
Low-Fidelity Prototype
We had multiple initial ideas and design sketches that were inspired by current playground installations and design considerations, as well as our childhood experiences. These include moving puzzles, interactive musical instruments that have different textures and shapes, all around architectural ramp for tables, tactile materials, among others.
We presented this idea to our coach and decided that with the time constraint, we had to narrow down our list to only a handful of ideas. We decided to create a low-fidelity prototype of one of the puzzles to show how choosing the right materials and adding a tactile element can enhance a child's play experience. The moving puzzle of a sun shown below is created with a tactile foam on top of the background. This method is better than printing the graphic directly on the material so that the users can feel the outer edges of the sun and its rays.
Aesthetic
To honor one of our main design considerations, we added inspirations for color palettes to Miro. This color representation helped guide the creation of the final high-fidelity prototype. A mix of soft and vibrant colors were added in consideration of children's stimulation capacity (i.e., some children may need less or more).
High-Fidelity Prototype
We decided on a portable installation with 5 separate and detachable interactive play pieces that include (from left to right):
- Rotational puzzle that can be enjoyed by multiple kids at a time. Each piece of the puzzle contains a triangle with 3 different pictures to increase replay value
- Interactive pipes that produce different sounds similar to a xylophone
- 2-sided numeric moving puzzle with engraved braille on the wood surface
- Textural balls of different surfaces which contain materials that can make sounds to stimulate different senses
- 2-sided graphic moving puzzle with a recognizable tactile picture
Materials
We also included a list of different potential materials and textures that are durable and weather-proof. We looked at current outdoor furnitures for inspiration as well as common materials found in playgrounds. Some of the materials that may be used are:
- Silicone
- Wood - especially for engraving purposed
- Colorful polypropylene
- Metal
- Strings
- Sponge
- PVC vinyl
- Outdoor rattan
- Sea glass for their colorful and reflective properties
Client Feedback
We presented our proposed design to RIT IdeaLab and to our coach and client expert and are very grateful for their positive responses.
I’m so happy to have been able to work with you all this past week. Hannah and Rez --- you were amazing. Only two team members, and such well thought-out designs and empathetic responses. I would love to see your schemes pushed to the next phase – both the panel design and the flowers (which Caralie and Dan may know less about…). |
I’d like to second what Marissa stated about your thoughtful design process. I’m not just saying this – your presentation really did stand out in all my years of doing this. I super appreciated the attention to detail you paid with both the user experience aspect of your design and the inclusive nature of your entire presentation. I showed the design to Rob Tortorella, Founder of Endless Highway, and he was very impressed. He uses a wheelchair for everyday mobility and when his daughter was a child it was difficult to find play spaces where he could interact with her rather than just watch. He suggested somehow elevating or cutting out enough space where someone in a wheelchair could roll right up to the panels which I thought was an interesting idea. |
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