First, I would like to explain the context of this project. It was carried out during the User Experience Immersive course by UXER School in Barcelona. The challenge was to choose a theme, get to know deeply the existing issues, define one of the issues founded to go even deeper, following the processes of Design Thinking and Lean Startup, and seek a good solution within the cycle learn-build-measure. Mandatorily we had to create an app that was part of the solution.
The theme chosen was elder people. The group participants were Stephanie Schoch, Tatiana Godinho, Eduard Serrat, Raquel Bernard and David Castro. You must be wondering: why elder people?
Nowadays, not only in Spain or even Europe but worldwide there is a considerable growth of the elderly population, as points the projection below about the Spanish population in the future:
Source: Informes Envejecimiento en Red do CSIC (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas), published on may 22nd, 2019.
UNDERSTANDING:
Facing this data, we created a Mind Map relating issues that elder people may face, and to validate these hypotheses, we interviewed 30 elderly people. After the interviews, we analyzed the data and found patterns of behavior and key moments. To assimilate all this information, we used the Synthesis Matrix methodology.
DEFINING:
From these surveys, with a better understanding of the panorama, we used some methods and tools, such as Matrix CSD — Certain, Assumptions and Doubts, based on the following questions:
What do we know?
What we think we know?
What we do not know?
What do we need to know?
Bellow some of the hypothesis:
From these hypotheses, we were able to make new interviews. The main points quoted by almost all interviewees were:
- They have an aversion to even thinking about living somewhere other than their homes (e.g. living in nursing homes or with relatives).
- They do not want to be a burden for their family.
- Many of them live alone and often they have no family, or their relatives live in other cities/countries.
- They always want to show that they are independent and that they can manage their routines, daily activities, even if some activities demand a lot of their effort.
Then we chose one of these presented issues as the hypothesis, the “autonomy” and from this one, we created 3 assumptions, based on the following structure:
“For the hypothesis to be true, the assumption must be true”
Assumption 1: They need autonomy to keep living in their houses
Assumption 2: They need autonomy to not become a burden to their family
Assumption 3: They need autonomy to manage their lives
Based on these assumptions, we used the methodology Job to Be Done, to have an overview of the pre-existing solutions on the market and evaluate which ones were the steps that the user must take to have access to these solutions, identifying losses and gain points to obtain or use them.
IDEATION
After understanding the context of User vs Market, we exchange and discuss ideas using some methodologies, such as Brainstorm. In this one, we presented our ideas in post-its on the wall and there was only one rule: no judgment was allowed, all ideas were welcomed, as crazy as they sounded.
Then we ordered the ideas between difficulty and originality. In the end, we voted for the best ideas putting a sticker on the post-its containing the ideas that were able to bring the solution to the initial issue.
Between the ideas we chose, the group decided to follow this one: a volunteer network to help elderly people in their daily activities.
This was a hypothetical solution that would need to be validated.
The first exercise that helped us to identify and make our idea stronger was: create a Pitch Elevator with Geoffrey Moore structure:
For (target customer)
Who (statement of need or opportunity)
The (product name) is a (product category)
That (key benefit, compelling reason to buy).
Unlike (primary competitive alternative)
Our product (statement of primary differentiation)
Many seniors want to feel independent, but sometimes they need help in their daily activities. Toctoc is a volunteer network, which offers punctual help to the elderly, so they don’t need to depend on their family or pay an assistant.
Starting from this Pitch, we used another tool: Storyboard that helped us to contextualize this idea and understand how it would work in the real world. The main goal to use this tool was to have a guideline as well as to present it to our interviewee to receive feedback. This link provides many canvas, like the one we used (showed in the image below):
The Storyboard above, made by our colleague Eduard Serrat, shows a punctual need of one hypothetical user and how Toctoc would solve it in 8 steps.
In the posse of this material, we carried out extra research with the new goal to understand which would be the user perception about the solution presented.
Feedbacks were very enlightening. Through this research we could realize many improving points reported by our users that we would not identify, such as:
- Security guarantee/ volunteer service trust;
- Unfamiliarity (by the seniors) with mobile apps;
- And many of them have no access to mobile internet.
DECIDING
At first we tried to find solutions to these negative feedbacks, but we realized that our issue was too broad. For this reason, we once again review the previous researches and we found one very meaningful voice message, turning us to change the idea (to pivot).
Briefly, in this voice message one of our interviewees, Laura Salon (86) tells that for her it seems a good idea to have someone greeting her every day, asking how she is doing. Because in her city many elderly have passed away and nobody noticed it for days or even months. Apparently sometimes many family members forget to be in touch or in other cases that person doesn’t even have a family. In her opinion, it would be great to see someone from time to time checking on her and knowing that she is not alone.
We interviewed more people and researched more about the topic. We ended up finding more data that reinforced the data collected during the interviews. We noticed that so far there were no solutions that solved this specific issue. We also found that the public health system of Barcelona, NGOs, and other institutions focusing on the elderly, have no knowledge about these deaths. They are mainly identified by a family member, friend or neighbor.
And we found the following information:
- In Spain, there are 1,933,200 people over 65 years that live alone. They represent 21.6% of Barcelona’s population.
- 0.7% of the people are over 80 years in Barcelona.
- 50% of these people suffer from a domestic fall each year, some of them fatal.
Therefore, we return to the processes of defining and ideating, using the same methodologies used before and some more to create a new hypothesis to be validated during new interviews.
With these new results from the interviews and market research, we built a value proposal.
And we came up with the following solution to the presented issue:
“Some seniors that live alone, whose deaths are not identified in days, weeks, or even months, confirm the statistics: ‘More and more elderly live alone and senior care services don’t cover everyone’.
To provide easier access to the elderly and prevent emergencies, we have created a solution that improves the management and control of elderly services, such as NGOs, public health system, among others.
This management system has a wide database of elderly, jointly with the application service used by the institution workers which are going to visit the seniors every day. These workers are going to report how the seniors are doing through the app that sends all this information to the system. This one will update de person’s status and create an alert in case of need that will be received by the institution so that it can act on it.
We ran out of time during the course to validate other hypotheses with some institutions of this segment, so we had to go to the prototyping process. I explained the situation in more details in the “Business model” process.
PROTOTYPING
In this process, we have three main actors: the elderly, workers, and institutions (NGO, Public health system, etc…)
In order to make this process clearer, we shot an explanatory video (subtitles in English available):
Then we developed a prototype of our app for the workers (subtitles in English available):
BUSINESS MODEL
Our proposition offers a system (back-end) and an app designed for the workers to report about the elderly every day. This system also identifies and alerts situations and notifies the institution in case of emergencies with those seniors that live alone. All these alerts, reading, and storage of data are done automatically by some algorithms programmed specifically for this back-end system.
These workers’ reports are saved on the app and all this information about the issues the elder people face every day is included in the database of this system, creating a record and the possibility of identifying recurring problems in their lives.
With this information, it is possible to improve the routine of this significant portion of the population.
About monetization, the role of the institution is to support the idea by financing the project development, in addition to promoting it and recruiting the workers through their own means*.
*We are considering the possibility, in the future, of hiring the workers directly ourselves instead of the institution in other to avoid a possible “pain point” of the elderly care services: recruiting workers. This is yet to be validated.
In a third moment, we thought about including electronic devices in the service process, such as bracelets, smart speakers or motion sensors to be installed in the seniors’ houses, besides the door-to-door service. This is yet to be validated.
With this proposal, the prevention of emergencies may be improved without losing the human touch, because some of our interviewees made it very clear that this is an important part: to know there is someone who cares.
REFLECTIONS:
As I write this case study, we are facing the Covid-19 pandemic. I am currently in Brazil observing that the first idea of “volunteer network” mentioned in this project, is being practiced by the population. Through apps or even notes left in elevators or building entrances, everyone is helping the elderly to shop their basic groceries, receive payments and buy medicines. People who don’t even know each other and even neighbors that have never spoken to each other before…
This situation proves that we do not always have to believe 100% in what the user says, but rather analyze the NEED within the context because it can change the situation and create new paths that the user was not expecting.
In this link you may find the Toctoc project presentation in the UXER Day from UXER School.
