The Garden
Virtual collaborative gardening community for seniors
(Feb-May. 2021)
This project aimed to look for innovative solutions to help establish effective and meaningful digital social connections for seniors.
The Garden is an online planting community for elderly users to upload, share, and comment on the plants they grow in real life and thus help them build virtual social connections with their real-life family and friends regardless of time and distance
Engage in the community house and connect through commenting/gifting interactions
- A community formed by those who you know in real life and who you really care about
- Interaction besides chats - whiteness, gifting, sharing
Begin the conversations and build your social web
- Find people of your real-life social circle quickly
- Make comments or direct message them to start talking
Easy management for low-literacy tech users
- Easy and straightforward searching funcion
- Update plant status by taking pictures
Highlighting remarkable moments and building up your own memoir
- Save posts or comments to capture important interactions and preserve the touching moments
1. Secondary Research: test out design feasibility
Reading research about applying technological solutions to encourage more social interactions among seniors enabled me to have fresh views and in-depth thinking about the successes and failures of precedential trials.
- success digital social events for the elderly are mostly arranged by professional organizations (i.e. community clubs, AARP), there are hardly any spontaneous activities besides families activities
- success digital social events for the elderly are mostly arranged by professional organizations (i.e. community clubs, AARP), there are hardly any spontaneous activities besides families activities
2. User Interview: Understanding the design opportunities
- Gather opinions towards the social media or related digital platforms
- Explore the design opportunities
The interview was conducted with 12 senior people in Clinton Hill neighborhood and Abe Stark Neighborhood Center
Want to connect with those they care -
11 participants use digital technology to connect with their friends or families
“I did weekly calls with my grandchildren, who live in another state.” —participant 1
“I dropped out in the middle of my online drawing class during the covid... I don’t feel I like doing it with people I have never met.”—participant 2
Activities/conversations are Topic oriented -
9 participants mentioned that conversations are topic-based and are usually started by sharing something
“I love to share the pictures of my flowers to my friends.” —participant 1
“I had volunteers who come to my place every week and now he talked to me through the phone instead... I can tell that he enjoys my stories(laugh).” —participant 2
Low engagement when not feel being seen -
6 participants indicated that they love offline social more since they feel more engaged
“I hardly felt engaged in online activities... it usually ended up with a conversation with a small circle of people” —participant 1
“I usually don’t feel very involved.” —participant 2
Difficulties with technologies -
10 participants state directly that they are unconfident in interacting with technologies
“I need my daughter’s assistance using Facebook to find people or book activities.” —participant 1
“I use Facebook on the computer more often than on the phone…It’s very hard to see the words, the titles and give instructions.” —participant 2
How might we design an online community for senior people to help them establish meaningful digital social connections?
Ideate
The ideation centered around using a topic that ties to the senior's daily life and can connect them with who the care.
After a series of considerations, the product’s topic is set to be a virtual plating community that allows sharing and connecting.
Storyboard
User journey Map
Key functions
- Start with find they real life friends
- Gamified Social Connection
A community house shared by real-life friends as co-editors | Posts of real-life plants | Plant-related virtual gifts - Plants Management
Add/delete plants | See planting instructions | Update plant model status | Edit placement on the map | Stylize plant pots - Friend Management
See their plants | Add friends - Album
View liked chats or posts
User Testing
In the usability test, I used Figma to create a rough interactive model, and randomly selected 4 elderly people in the Clinton Hill neighborhood to test. During the research, several questions arose:
"What is the difference between the chatting under comments and sending gifts? I am a bit lost."
“How can I exit from the front yard view to the main page?“
“I don’t feel that I can always successfully use the camera function.“
Add instructions for the interactions with the garden and plant models
Gamification functions like placing the virtual plants are hard for low-literacy tech users
Refocus on the social rather than the game aspect
Users showed little interest in changing pot colors and seeing plant instructions
Overlapped Comments and Gift Wish Words functions
3 users are confused about the dialogue under comments and gift wish words during the test
Allow alternative methods to update plants
2 users didn't complete the task of updating plant status through taking pictures
Iterations
- delete the pot editing page and the planting instruction page
- add alternative methods to update the growth status
- add updates history page to access the history posts and comments for this plant
- make the gift sending function available right after uploading new posts
- delete the gift wish words function
- separate the chats and comments into two different interfaces
- add a button leading to the instruction page on the home page
- use algorithm to provide demanded instruction
- video demonstration enabling understanding for different interactions(tap, drag, zoom)
The visual representations here aimed to assist a seamless and easy-to-use product positioning, and bring in visual elements corresponding to the subject of planting. To achieve this objective, I carefully avoid using abstract languages for the icons and selected a lively color palette.
As a product designed for a special group, the most difficult aspect of this project is to deeply understand the potential needs of elderly users. In the preliminary research process, I also encountered many negative voices, but the potential design opportunities hide in this important stage of emphasizing. Only by truly clarifying the pain points and both the explicit and implicit needs of this particular group can this project have real practical significance.
If there is more time to continue to develop this project, I hope to be able to conduct several more rounds of user testing based on an interactive garden model and further explore the boundaries of senior users’ capability with the interaction commands. And I would love to reach into the more specific user groups to identify various physical obstacles more clearly and further pushes the idea of accessibility. Playing around with other possible solutions for the connectivity desired by the user group and seeing the nuanced differences in their effectiveness could also be helpful in constructing a more engaging user experience.
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