Key words: User Experience Design, Online Community, Mobile Application, Aging Tech, Sustainability
Methods: Secondary Research, Competitor Analysis, Contextual Inquiries, Task Analysis, Persona, Storyboard, Mind map, User flow, Wireframes, Logo Design, Prototyping, Customer Journey
Type: Individual Project
Timeline: April 2021 - June 2021
The inspiration of this project comes from the observation of my grandma. Under the rapid urbanization process in China, she moved from countryside to the city and lived with us three years ago. After moving to city, she cannot fit into the environment and miss the past farming lifestyle a lot. The restricted land-use and relatively isolated social networks makes her feel lonely and disoriented.
I cannot help wonder, is adaptation a common problem for elders moving from rural areas? If so, how many elders are currently affected in China? Driven by these questions, I want to research about this topic and design a solution that helps my grandma adapt to the city.
How can we help elders adapt to urban lifestyles during urbanization?
1. Understand the experience of elders transitioning to the urban lifestyles
2. Recognize the habits, behaviors, and preferred lifestyle for elders
3. Identify the gap between the urban lifestyles and their preferred ones
4. Design a solution that fills the gap and help them adapt to urban lifestyles
My design outcome is a Mobile App that allows collaborative farming for the elders on the land of community regulated area. Users can collaborate to complete a farming project on this platform. It aims to improve both physical environment in the community and psychological status or the elders
I started out by understanding the scope of this project through secondary research to answer the following questions:
1. How rapid is China's urbanization process?
2. How many elders are affected by the current urbanization process?
According to Tsinghua University Economic Data center, the latest demolition of land during urbanization affects 16% of households. Based on the stats from the Seventh Census Survey, that is roughly 79 millions households and 40 millions elders.
According to the report "China Urbanization 2.0: Super Metropolis" released by Morgan Stanley, China's urbanization rate will rise to 75% by 2030 (an increase of 220 million new citizens).
How are elders affected by the urbanization process?
To understand the effect of urbanization on elders, I first observe two of my neighbors who moved to the household from rural areas for five days. I organized their general patterns of activity.
As shown here, their lifestyle is monotonous, relatively socially isolated, and centered at entertainment and diets.
To know how elders feel and and think about their current lifestyles. I interviewed 6 elders coming from countryside and 3 elders coming from the city. After interview, I found that both elders coming from countryside and from the city express interest in planting, like farming and gardening. So, I designed a survey to know more about this activity among elders. I distributed the physical survey in 3 communities and received 24 respondents.
To better understand the contexts and process of planting, I conducted task analysis to audit the tools needed and the contextual factors influencing this process.
Based on the information I gathered from the exploratory research above, I synthesized findings to develop two personas and guide ideation.
Combining the result from task analysis and persona, I created the storyboard to represent the user case of elders transitioning from countryside to the city.
Convenient : User don't need to take extra efforts to be able to engage with the activity in question with the consideration of cramped city environment included.
Plant fresh and healthy vegetables: Users can have access to farm work and harvest vegetables to meet their need for healthy products.
Social connection: Users would have a platform to meet people and enjoy social activity both digitally and physically.
Exchange skills: Users should be able to learn from each other and flourish through the reciprocal tutoring and learning.
There are three types of solution out there to allow farmwork in the city context: virtual App, physical product and real service. I select three examples from each category and compare them from eight perspectives.
In this process, I brainstormed two main design strategies, grow vegetables at home and at community, to meet the user goals. Then, I used three metrics (spatiality, sociability, and usability) to evaluate each and chose the community based city farming.
3 users helped to test the paper prototypes and walked through the customer journey. As they performed tasks, I asked them to think aloud about the process and possible confusion. Once the users completed their tasks, we asked several follow-up questions:
1. How useful is this application for you?
2. How easy is this application to use?
3. Is there any part confusing about this application?
4. Would you recommend this application to someone?
5. Are you satisfied with this application?
The overall feedback I received indicated that users are relatively satisfied with the function of this application. However, they suggested me to improve more on the design about the following aspects.
Accessibility & Universal Design: Given the user characteristics of elders, the App should have more non-functional features supporting their accessible needs, like larger font size, color contrast and icons more pertinent to their common understanding.
Features that promotes social interaction: The current interaction still focuses on the recording of planting except the one that allows users to see the farming activity of neighbors. More features like sharing and online chatting should be considered to increase the social interaction on the platform, while more research is needed to determine to extent of online social interaction is preferred for elders.
Feedback and Testing: I would try to gather more participants to test my ideas and prototypes because the current number I have is still not adequate and may not reliable enough address the individual difference in both functional and non-functional requirements.
The role of community: The perspective of this design is mainly from the users of elders, while the role of community is also important to determine the types of available farmwork and the amount of harvest distributed. The community management staff should have a separate system to document the data and manage the ongoing farmwork projects.
