DriveMe
Help Seniors Go Anywhere, Anytime
Duration
3 months (Oct - Dec 2022)
Team
Angela Chan
Luka Liu
Michelle Wu
Paxon Wallace
Role
Research
Usability testing
Prototyping
Video editing
Tools
Adobe Suite
Figma
ProtoPie
OVERVIEW
Background
Senior centers, recognized by the Older Americans Act (OAA) as a community focal point, are one of the most widely used services among America’s older adults. Compared with their peers, older adults who participate in senior center activities have higher health, social interaction, and life satisfaction levels
However, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, approximately one-third of all seniors live by themselves. Seniors do not always have access to private transportation and are not always able to utilize public transportation to get to the senior center. At the same time, many senior centers have reported having fewer resources and manpower to serve seniors due to labor shortages
Problem
How might we meet the transportation needs of seniors so that we may ease the logistics and resource burden on senior center staff?
Solution
With the aim of solving this problem, we came up with DriveMe - a call-based service that allows seniors to independently arrange rides to and from the senior center without having to directly interface with a ride-share app
Automated Phone System
Launch Video
RESEARCH
Before we could arrive at our solution, we first had to get an understanding of our users and who we were designing for.
As part of our research we used three research methods to drive and scope our project:
Secondary Research
Easily accessible and helped us to gain a high-level understanding of seniors, their goals and surrounding environment
Our team was researching studies and articles about seniors and climate change
Fly On The Wall Observation
Observed how seniors behaved at senior center and interacted with the staff and organization
Observing seniors' daily activities in Central Area Senior Center
User Interview
Conducted one-on-one semi-structured and unstructured interview to gain an understanding of seniors' preferences, needs, motivations and issues senior center staff are faced with
Conversing with a 98-year old senior
Key Insights -
Seniors
01 The majority of seniors would visit the center to participate in specific
pre-planned activities
02 Some seniors would need to drive themselves or contact MetroAccess to
take them to the center
03 Seniors had difficulties visiting centers when the weather is bad
because some of them couldn't get to the center on their own
Key Insights -
Senior Center Staff
01 Senior center has an inadequate staffing issue
02 The staff have to arrange carpools in order to provide an alternative for
seniors who have difficulties commuting to the center
03 Senior center staff need more support for transportation to
accommodate seniors with commute assistance
DEFINE
Using the findings from our research, we generated two personas that helped us better orient our design goals and guide our design decision.
User Personas
DESIGN
Firstly, we created a set of design requirements as guidelines for the ideation process. Then we used the Crazy 8's method to come up with multiple ideas. Next, we evaluated the strengths, weaknesses, feasibility and originality of each idea before refining our three most promising ideas.
Three Main Ideas
01 AI-based Shuttle Service: AI-based dispatcher will call the active
members of the senior center to schedule rides to and from the senior
center. All ride requests will be fed into a system to generate the most
optimal shuttle route and the number of shuttles needed for the day.
Rides will then be assigned to volunteer drivers or staff drivers of the
senior center
02 Volunteer Book: A network of volunteers helping the senior
center with resource issues. Senior center staff will vet the
volunteers before adding them to the network and seniors can call
volunteers based on the volunteer's profile
03 Ride-share Program for Seniors: A community-mode feature within
ride-share apps that provides free or affordable rides for senior users.
Seniors are able to request a ride on-demand via a ride-share app or a
“Senior-friendly” call-in option. Drivers, charities, and corporations can
contribute by donating their time or money to fund rides
DriveMe - Automated Phone System
After evaluating these three ideas thoroughly, we decided to combine AI-based Shuttle Service and Ride-share Program for Seniors to form an automated phone system and called this service as "DriveMe".
AI-based Shuttle Service
01 Minimum technological literacy from seniors
02 Optimal route would shorten ride duration
03 Reduce the burden of commute planning on senior center staff
Ride-share Program for Seniors
01 Eliminate workload on senior center staff
02 Allow seniors to access the same transportation services
as everyone else does
PROTOTYPE
Firstly, we created a user flow accordingly because it could help us to know what actions a user has to take and also informed us of the interactions that we would need to consider during the prototyping stage.
User Flow Diagram
* Box in gray is triggered by the system
* Box in white denotes user actions
Information Architecture
We started building out DriveMe into a medium-fidelity prototype to proceed with usability testing. To aid the design process of our prototype, we created the information architecture of DriveMe to get a sense of the scale and structure
There are three levels to our information architecture which support key interactions:
-
Arranging rides to and from the center
-
Ride confirmation calls
-
Ride notification calls
* There are other interactions documented in our
information architecture but we will only be focusing
on the three mentioned above for the scope of this project
Medium Fidelity Prototype
With the information architecture in place, we could identify key flows which we wanted to test during our usability testing sessions. With the use of voice recordings and Google Slides, we created a clickable prototype to aid us with our usability testing
Script for DriveMe's automated system
Clickable prototype to demonstrate the experience of interacting with DriveMe
USABILITY TESTING
We held our usability testing sessions at the Central Area Senior Center with four participants and the recruitment was through snowball sampling with the help of senior center staff. Testing was aimed at finding out if DriveMe was desirable and if it was easy to use for seniors.
Conducted usability testing with a senior
Key Findings
01 Participants were very receptive to DriveMe and found it easy to use
02 While seniors were receptive to DriveMe and felt it easy enough to
use, they conveyed their apprehension with technology
03 Participants were pleased to have more transportation options
which would give them more flexibility
04 DriveMe can be extended to be accessible to seniors who are
visually impaired with voice command
Limitations
01 Sample size of participants was not sufficient for a qualitative study
02 Participants were not savvy with digital prototypes
03 Required more testings by using devices that seniors are familiar with
DELIVERABLES
After gathering insights from testing, we created a phone interface mock up and recorded the experience of engaging with DriveMe automated phone system to demonstrate the interaction between DriveMe and seniors.
DriveMe is calling a senior and asking whether he/she needs a ride to the senior center
Senior just needs to use keypad to arrange rides
Onboarding Program
In order to reduce seniors’ apprehension with technology, we also developed a preliminary onboarding program which could help reduce cognitive load on seniors when being introduced to new service and help build their trust towards the service
Launch Video
I also created an animated launch video, which could help us to illustrate more information in a more appealing way and telling a story of how DriveMe can help seniors move around independently