We designed a digital scrapbook to create an effective medium for elders to connect with their close ones easily and efficiently by encouraging them to create and share scrapbooks cherishing memories together with their family and friends.
At a glance
Nominated for the annual UTS Prototype Exhibition 2019 and currently inspiring students on lecture slides.
Astra Frame was designed as part of the Interaction Design subject during university and the goal was to design a solution to promote active ageing among the elderly. The WHO adopted the term active ageing, arguing that if we optimize older adults’ opportunities for health, participation and security as they age, we can support them to be healthy, productive, and active participants in life whilst enhancing their quality of life. In other words, “adding life to years and not merely years to life”.
Client
Interaction Design Subject
My Role
Product Design Lead & Marketer: User Research, Interaction, Visual Design, Prototyping, Testing, Branding, Animation and Making Video
Duration
Team
Painting the picture...
We designed a digital scrapbook to create an effective medium for elders to connect with their close ones easily and efficiently by encouraging them to create and share scrapbooks cherishing memories together with their family and friends.
Design in Action
I shot and edited a short video demonstrating how Astra Frame helped 👵Karen reconnect memories with her loved ones.
Research
Desk Research
The first step we took was to understand active ageing by studying research papers and articles to help us create a semi-structured interview guide for people over the age of 55 to gather rich qualitative data.
We wanted to learn about how they felt about their overall well-being, social life, desires and how technology might support them as they age. In particular, we focused on their connection with their loved ones and the challenges they face being away from family since we found from research that the majority of the elderly experience loneliness.
"More than 40% of seniors regularly experience loneliness, according to a University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) study. "
User Interviews
We conducted 5 semi-structured interviews that helped us empathise with the lived and felt experiences of people over the age of 55 living away from their families. The data obtained were then analysed using affinity mapping that helped us categorize the findings.
Desk Research
Industry trends and user expectations for AI tools were explored to better understand market needs.
Familiarity: Users wanted the platform to feel as intuitive and familiar as a traditional search engine.
Multi-AI Demand: The need for multi-AI aggregation was evident, but existing platforms often neglected usability and simplicity.
Retention Tools: Features like saving, tagging, and revisiting responses were seen as essential for a complete user experience.
Insights and Persona
From our research findings, we decided to focus on tackling their issues of loneliness and staying connected with their family with the help of activities elders like.
Elders like activities and being in social activity clubs.
Elders feel lonely and go through old photos and memories of their loved ones.
Elders want to stay connected with their close ones and share memories.
One of the interviewees mentioned scrapbooking which was interesting.
Based on the insights, we set up a persona (👵Karen)that was referred throughout the entire product development process and will be referred throughout the case study.
Define
The Problem
Moving to the next stage, we defined a "how might we" question analysing the results from the research stage to define the challenges to focus on.
"How might we create an experience that helps elders connect and bond with their loved ones to promote active ageing?"
We found from further desk research that scrapbooking is an activity that has many advantages for the active ageing of elders. Elders love to cherish their memories by looking at photos, expressing their stories and sharing them with their loved ones which help them bond and stay connected. Creating and sharing scrapbooks helps them overcome loneliness and can also reduce stress in older adults because it allows them to share stories from their life in a creative way.
Problem Scenario
"👵Karen is 67 years old and stays with her husband. Her children are away and comes occasionally to visit her. She misses being a part of her children and grandchildren’s lives. To keep herself happy and engaged, she resorts to creating scrapbooks. Her children send photos of birthday celebrations and family get-togethers by WhatsApp regularly. Since she isn’t good with technology, she finds it difficult to access and have them printed. Moreover, as part of traditional scrapbooking, she needs to go to the store to shop for necessary accessories (stickers, adhesives, pens) and must print duplicates of photos in case they have tampered. These are tedious tasks for her. After creating a scrapbook after all these troubles, she finds it difficult to share it with her family and loved ones. She wishes if there was someone who could suggest a simpler and cost-effective way of creating these scrapbooks and sharing them."
Pain Points
Obtaining stationaries and photos to create a scrapbook.
Creating copies of old photos and printing digital photos.
Have to wait until close ones visit to show the scrapbook.
Using technology to share it with loved ones far away.
Ideate
The Solution
We started the ideation phase by empathising with 👵Karen's pain points and came up with a simple and elegant product design for a digital photo frame with scrapbooking features which we called Astra Frame. We decided to focus on using tactile, physical and audio interactions as well as utilising the power of familiarity using design metaphors to create a meaningful user experience for elders like 👵Karen.
The product has 3 main physical elements:
Frame/Scrapbooking device: a tablet with an inbuilt application for creating digital scrapbooks that also shows a slideshow of photos and scrapbooks when idle. We decided the tablet should have a large display for visibility and provide haptic feedback to make interactions feel tactile.
Pen/Scanner: a stylus pen used for input and can also scan photographs into digital. We decided to use only tap and writing gestures to avoid confusion. Also, the stylus can scan photographs by sliding over them easily.
Wireless Charger/Printer: a stand with wireless charging and printer to print photos and scrapbooks. The tablet would turn into a photo frame when charging. We decided a wireless charger would avoid the hassle of connecting a charger and also easily switch into a photo frame.
Future Scenario
"Ever since 👵Karen started using this technology, she can store and view a collection of pictures that is already in her possession or the ones her family shares digitally. When she wants to add old photographs, she uses this technology to scan images and then uploads them. After she finishes editing, she prints them at home itself as well. Moreover, she can write her memories in the scrapbook she created. This technology allows her family to record messages and share their everyday pictures with her as well. She even enjoys features like adding comments, creating collages, adding frames, stickers and so on."
Storyboard
We also created a storyboard portraying how Astra Frame helped elders like 👵Karen connect with their loved ones through the art of digital scrapbooking and enjoy memories by watching them in the slideshows.
Low- Fidelity Sketching
Our team started sketching low fidelity wireframes individually for the frame/scrapbooking device based on the features we discovered in the Future Scenario and Storyboard following Norman's Principles of Design -Visibility, Feedback, Affordance, Mapping, Constraints, Consistency and Signifiers.
Prototype
Our team selected design elements from individual sketches and I created medium-fidelity wireframes using Adobe XD and printed the screens and a paper Astra Frame device to conduct user testing.
Mid-Fidelity Wireframes
We gave the users a goal to create a scrapbook page using a combination of both printed and digital photos and share it among their family members. Using at least 1 scanned photo and 1 digital photo would help us identify the ease of importing both formats of pictures.
Validate
We conducted 5 user tests with elders over the age of 55 using the thinking aloud method and we used Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics to evaluate the usability. Our main objective was to analyse the ease of use and flow of creating and sharing a scrapbook using Astra Frame.
Test Scenario
We gave the users a goal to create a scrapbook page using a combination of both printed and digital photos and share it among their family members. Using at least 1 scanned photo and 1 digital photo would help us identify the ease of importing both formats of pictures.
Observations
Users found it difficult to locate undo and redo in the scrapbook canvas.
Users were unable to switch between photo-frame mode and scrapbook mode.
Users wanted a colour picker tool and not just a colour palette.
Users found the navigation tab easy to use and switch between pages.
Users were able to scan old photographs into digital intuitively.
Recommendations
Our team decided to make the following changes in response to the observations from our user testing to enhance usability:
We increased the size of undo and redo buttons on the scrapbook canvas and changed its position to enhance visibility.
We modified the Navigation Tab so that users can quickly switch between photo-frame mode and scrapbook mode.
We added a colour pick tool along with the colour palette for choosing colours from the images.
Final Showcase
Logo and Branding
I designed the logo and set brand guidelines, colour palette and typography hierarchy for Astra Frame.
Try the Protoype
Astra Frame UI was designed with Material Design Guidelines using Adobe XD. The prototype is embedded below and you are welcome to try it out!
"Try creating a scrapbook with a birthday template for Jonah's Birthday s shown in the video, by scanning a photograph, selecting photos, using backgrounds, stickers and sharing it with George!"