Funaging Elderly Educational Service by Ting-Han Chen is a highly esteemed winner of the very prestigious 2023 A' Design Award in Meta, Strategic and Service Design Competition Category.
IronService· 2023
Funaging Elderly Educational Service
Client: Play Design Lab
A' Design Award Winner in Service Category
Verified Award Winner
Verify Award Status for #145605The Design
About Funaging Elderly Educational Service
FunAging is an educational service offering classes of smartphone apps to accompany and empower the elderly. FunAging disseminates the class information with the elderly via Line, a widely used social app in Taiwan among the elderly. However, many elderly have difficulties in registering classes via Line as its interface is not elderly-friendly. This project employs senior-centered service design thinking to enhance the class registration process. A set of systematic design diagnosis clarifies the UX issues, with insightful design deliverables, to make the service more fluent and effective.
The Recognition
About the A' Design Award
Funaging Elderly Educational Service is an Iron A' Design Award winner, a prestigious recognition granted to good designs that meet the professional and industrial requirements expected from well-designed creations. Iron winners demonstrate great skill, high specialization, expert understanding, and creative capacity of their creators. Funaging Elderly Educational Service is expected to be a highly regarded, admired, and cherished creation that is practical and innovative. This Iron A' Design Award-winning design integrates industry best practices and has competent technical characteristics linked with know-how and talent. Funaging Elderly Educational Service is respected for its thoroughness and is designed to provide quality of life improvements that help make the world a better place.
Interviews
Grand Interview
Your innovative approach to reducing elderly assistance calls from 20% to 0% with Funaging Elderly Educational Service is remarkable - could you walk us through the key insights that led to this dramatic improvement in user experience?
The key to our success was continuous user testing on-site, allowing us to gain direct feedback from elderly users. By observing and learning from their interactions, we identified areas for simple design adjustments that had a significant impact. This iterative process of testing, engaging with users, and applying their feedback led to a dramatic reduction in assistance calls—from 20% to 0%. It demonstrated how minor yet thoughtful tweaks can greatly enhance the user experience.
The integration of LINE app within Funaging Elderly Educational Service presents unique technical constraints - how did you develop creative solutions to enhance readability and user comprehension while working within these platform limitations?
Design thrives under constraints—it is through these limitations that creative solutions are born. When working with the LINE app's platform constraints, I first sought to fully understand the limitations, such as its operational and message interface capabilities. This allowed me to identify specific challenges for readability and user comprehension among elderly users. From there, I focused on creating design adjustments that simplified navigation and emphasized clear, accessible communication. By tailoring content presentation to the platform's strengths and limitations, we managed to enhance user comprehension and usability effectively.
Your customer journey mapping for Funaging Elderly Educational Service identified 12 distinct UX issues - could you elaborate on the most critical challenges you discovered and how your solutions specifically addressed the cognitive needs of elderly users?
The most critical challenge went beyond the digital medium itself—how to remind elderly users of class schedules when they were not actively using their digital devices. Recognizing that many elderly users enjoy browsing through photos on their phones, we leveraged this habit by creating visual reminder cards stored in their photo galleries, serving as subtle cues whenever they viewed their photos. However, we also knew this couldn't fully replace automated reminders, so we complemented it with manual phone call reminders from the operations team. This dual-confirmation approach effectively addressed their cognitive needs, ensuring they could remember and attend their scheduled classes.
Behind the Design
Press Kit
Credits, team members and technical details provided by the designer.
- Unique Properties
- Difficulties in registering the class for the elderly, such as unaware of key information during the process, unable to find specific function, or uncertainty for whether they have successfully registered the class, and so forth.
In this project, we use senior-centered service design thinking to review the overall class registration process to identify key UX problems. A set of systematic design diagnosis clarifies the design issues, with insightful design deliverables, to make the service more fluent and effective. - Dimensions & Packaging
- 1. Optimized service workflow, UI elements and graphic assets;
2. MENU architecture, and Event Cards templates for LINE App.
3. Improved service logic and guidelines. - Tags
- service design, elderly, senior-centered, accessible design, older adults, senior users, inclusive design, universal design, aging, senior citizens
- Production Technology
- We employ the following focus as our design approaches:
(1) Customer journey mapping;
(2) Sorting out the main axes of the customer journey;
(3) Consolidation of key touchpoints on the main axis;
(4) Interface design (UI/UX) on key touchpoints;
(5) Experience iterations.
Through implementation, we evaluate the direction of revision through the actual use by the elderly users, and the "experience iteration" goes back and forth many times, approaching the final and perfect design outcome. - Design Challenge
- Since LINE has covered 95% of Taiwanese population’s social media use, deeply tied to the elderly’s daily social lives, it’s not practical to introduce new platforms to pull them out of what they have already accustomed to. However, LINE app doesn't provide open source code for flexible customization, thus we had to invent new techniques under LINE's technical constraints to align with elderly's cognitive capabilities.
For instance, some elderly can't remember which classes they have had registered. Hence, we design a pictorial card with class information to be saved on their smart phone as their reminder. Or, as it's not possible to adjust character spacing and line spacing, we use rephrasing and blank lines to enhance readability for the paragraphs. These details are not obvious, but play a big role. - Research
- This project attempts to improve FunAging's online registration experience for the elderly. We used a more macro service design perspective to tackle interface operation problems under technical constraints. Through elderly-centered service design thinking, the percentage of elderly calling for help during the registration process has been decreased from 20% to 0 in a short period.
- Inspiration
- FunAging is an educational brand in Taiwan offering smartphone app courses of various topics to accompany and empower the elderly, enabling them to maintain a social life and enjoy learning new things.
FunAging disseminates the new course information with the elderly via LINE, a widely used social app in Taiwan, also among the elderly. But many newbies have difficulties in using it, especially in registering courses via LINE, as it does not optimize its overall design for the elderly.
How might we better redesign the overall service, especially for the course registration experience, for the elderly? - Project Duration
- The project started in June 2022 and finished in Dec 2022 in Taipei.
- Operation Flow
- We identify 12 UX issues in the customer journey mapping. With corresponding elderly-first design prescriptions, a new service workflow is implemented, with user interface and design artifacts remodeled. In the end, the percentage of elderly calling for help during the registration process has been decreased from 20% to 0 in a short period.
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