OWLO, Everyone!

This article is a part of the NYP Projects collection

Table of contents

• Background
• Planning
• Development
• Conclusion

Background

Elderly face challenges in social participation. Causes of this include; mobility constraints, lack of companions, lack of motivation, lack of opportunities, lack of IT skills.

Technology-based initiatives ensure the elderly feel valued. Hence older adults should not be seen as passive users but should have opportunities to contribute and share knowledge with others

In our survey, we concluded that there is a lack of engagement from the general public toward the elderly. There are justifications and reasons for the gap in interaction, however, this affects the elderly as they crave social connectedness.

Therefore, as a team, we wanted to see how might we encourage and enable the public to engage the elderly, or the elderly themselves to be engaged.

We brainstormed many solutions to cater to the problem. We stumbled on the idea to build an app where 1. elderlies can participate in workshops 2. People/volunteers can plan events that can engage the elderly with ease 3. Users can earn rewards when they participate in events or plan them.

These series of ideas are then funneled into 3 separate functions in our app; OWLO Workshop, OWLO Plan, and OWLO Library.

Resources

You can read further about each of the different features from these resources:

It is a very big project, i recommend only going over my features, OWLO Plan.

• Pitch deck | A brief overview of users and features
• UX Presentation Slides | In-depth elaboration of users, problem statement + user flow solution

Planning

Roles and Delegation

I was the leader and had 4 other team members. I worked on OWLO Plan, 2 members were on OWLO Library, and the remaining 2 worked on OWLO Workshop.

Timeline

For OWLO project, we focused on User-Centered Design (UCD). We utilized tools in the Design Process to first understand our users, and the problem and craft our solution to directly cater to our users. After the UCD phase, we quickly develop our app and split it into 4 separate phases, and upon completion, we performed usability testing.

User-Centered Design

1. As was mentioned in the background section, we surveyed our target audience by sending out google forms to our friends who are in contact with their elder relatives. Afterward, we created a survey report:
2. We then brainstormed and ideate on solutions that cater to our problem statement.
3. We create personas to understand and empathize with our target audience better
4. Using the personas, we created customer journey maps, and empathy maps and designed our Service Blueprint.
5. We then crafted our problem statements and ideate on possible solutions.
6. We then iteratively designed a high-fidelity prototype

Resources

Miro Board | Contains our wireframe, suggestion only viewing my section

App development

After the prototype, we quickly moved into the development phase. Our app development phase is split into 4 phases: System design, Project Files, Development stage 1, and Development stage 2.

1. System Design

In this phase, we designed use-case diagrams and data models for each of users; Elderly, General Public, volunteers, and admins. This helps us visualize all the different features and how they communicate with different systems in our application. As we were going with a relational database, a data model helped ensure all the different data attributes required for each of the features.

2. Project Files

Before diving into building each of our features right away, the team finalized and agreed on the interface of each of the different sites of our app i.e. Plan, Workshop, and Library. Ultimately we believe that since each of the sites is catering to different users we built different layouts and interfaces for each of them. This allows better differentiation between the sites.

3. Development stages 1 and 2

We split the development stage into 2. Each of them has a set of features that each of the team members has listed and will need to be completed before the integration and testing deadline that Iset.

Resources

You can view the following documentation to view our planning process:

• Project report | Described project, Plan, team roles and responsibilities, and System design
• Project Timeline | View our tasks and timeline
• Big Use Case Diagram

Usability Testing

Concurrently, during the development of our application, we wanted to find out whether our features were usable. We created tasks and metrics to see if users are able to able to navigate and complete those tasks. We noted down any feedback we receive and updated the design of our features in the development phase.

Resources

• UXDMT Project report | Contains our survey report, Personas, Empathy maps, Customer Journey maps and Service Blueprint
• Usability Test Plan | Contains logistics of the test, methodologies and tasks
• Usability Test Findings

Development

OWLO Plan is a feature that primarily caters to volunteers and organizers, that i worked on.

We can also word the features above, differently i.e. Volunteer Management, Project management and Publicity.

Resources

To view the details of the features, please view the following resources:

• Main readME | Describes how to get run our application
• Feature specific readME — OWLO Plan | Describes how to utilize OWLO Plans along with visuals.

Conclusion

The project was a huge undertaking. Over the span of 4 months, we had to do our UI design and UX research, subsequently develop, integrate, and test. All this while learning the tools and processes on the go.

If I could do things differently, it would have been to minimize our scope and make our solutions slightly smaller. However, it was big and spanned different users, because each of my team members and myself included was incentivized to build a lot of features and contribute a lot due to the grading system. However, i look back at this project, and i am often proud of the development, planning and having it all come together and produce a usable solution