Dementia Friends
2 weeks redesign to engage, empower and enable users towards a dementia-friendly Singapore
Client: Dementia Friends Platform: Mobile Duration: 2 weeks (May 2022) Role: UX Lead & Presentation Designer
My Role
I was responsible for leading the UX research and redesign of the app to improve its relevancy with its users’ needs.
As we were unfamiliar with dementia, to kickstart the project right with good understanding of its landscape and the right scope of users, I reached out extensively to various related organisations and professionals through social media and cold calling and was the main liason thereafter.
Working collaboratively with my teammate, I led our design direction with research and was primarily responsible for designing and prototyping the volunteer persona’s flow.
As we were unfamiliar with dementia, to kickstart the project right with good understanding of its landscape and the right scope of users, I reached out extensively to various related organisations and professionals through social media and cold calling and was the main liason thereafter.
Working collaboratively with my teammate, I led our design direction with research and was primarily responsible for designing and prototyping the volunteer persona’s flow.
Brief
Dementia Friends mobile app was launched in 2018 as part of Dementia-Friendly Singapore initiative with 2 main functions:
To cope with the increasing number for dementia, we were tasked to redesign its existing experience and uncover new opportunities.
- consolidate resources and information on dementia and caregiving
- leverage the community of Dementia Friends to help keep a lookout for missing persons with dementia
To cope with the increasing number for dementia, we were tasked to redesign its existing experience and uncover new opportunities.
Approach
Beyond functionality
Although the primary aim of the app was to leverage community to help keep a lookout for missing persons in the community, we realised that enhancing the functionality of it was not sufficient for achieving the big goal of a dementia-friendly Singapore due to:
- low user engagement from low and infrequent occurrence of a missing person with dementia - about ten per month
- low awareness and market presence of app
We needed more desirability for the app while also meeting the needs of our users and social goal.
Through extensive user research to understand our users’ needs and pain points throughout the caregiving journey and during situation of a missing person with dementia, we derived at 3 key focus for redesign:
- community crowdsourcing
- information architecture restructuring
- personalising experience for 3 key users - caregiver, volunteer and public
What We Did
Insights
From our user interviews with 10 caregivers and volunteers, we identified 3 key insights:
- need for an emotionally supportive environment
- motivation to foster a safe and friendly dementia community
- lack of knowledge to help
These insights are translated into the following “How might we..?” to reframe the problem and guide ideation:
- HMW faciliate a quicker and easier search process of a missing person with dementia?
- HMW create a supportive ecosytem that caregivers can rely on?
Visualising end-to-end experience
Using journey mapping, we visualised the end-to-end experience of our users to focus our attention when designing.
What stood out particularly detrimental to user experience were:
- lack of navigation precision to support volunteer in helping a lost person with dementia
- lack of intuitive design
- messy and unrelatable information architecture and content
Solution
Improved navigation and “Add Sighting” shortcut
Improved navigation of Go-To-Points and efficiency of sighting updates to allow volunteers to help missing persons with dementia get to safety quickly.
Social and informational support features for caregivers’ needs
Introduced social features (chats & sharings) and improved the relevancy of resources for addressing caregivers’ emotional and informational needs throughout their journey.
Results
In 2 weeks, we redesigned Dementia Friends into a personalised community-crowdsourcing app for 3 key users (caregivers, volunteers and public) to harness support from each other efficiently and effectively:
- reduced time taken from 3 to 1 click to add a sighting
- potential increase in user engagement with user differentiation content
The research and prototype were also shared to Dementia Friends and CARA personnel-in-charge.
Next Steps
To improve, further usability testings could be conducted to uncover problems and opportunities involved in:
- enhancing the ease and efficiency of search process
- improving support provided by the app for various groups
Additionally, we have also identified the following to further refine on:
- UI and consistency of brand identity
- Further user research to deep dive on types of resources content useful for users
Takeaway
It had being a meaningful journey to see how community-involvement app can help to solve real problems.
Given the time, I’d love to refine on how to make the experience of searching a person more reassuring when considering so many human factors - anxiety and unfamilarities - in place when losing / finding a person with dementia.
Lastly, many thanks to all the kind people who allowed us to reach out to and being so willing to open up on such a difficult topic! A big shoutout to Ms Vivian and Mr Chandraajothi from New Horizon, Nic (AWWA), Geline (CARA) and Chen Chin (Dementia Friends) for accommodating us on such short notice and sharing so kindly with us!
