Overview

A 4 hour hackathon with Hackney council and The Alzheimers Society to create a mobile app to help individuals suffering with dementia. The app was then presented to a panel of 5 and voted the winner.

The problem

Hackney council had a number of people living in the borough who suffer with dementia and wanted to help those individuals with their everyday lives.

The goal

The objective in sight was to create an app to assist dementia sufferers with everyday activities which included: going to the shop, going to appointments, or even going to a friends house.

The team

With a team consisting of 5, including myself, were two SMEs’, a lead UX designer and a speech specialist.

Responsibilities

UX design, Interaction design, Wireframing, Prototyping.

The Process

My process will be different in different projects and will be determined by many factors such as the project goals, business needs, complexity of the problem, time and etc. Here I’ll describe my process for solving this problem.

Discovery

Define the user

With the knowledge of the two SMEs we began by asking lots of questions to help better our understanding of the users, everyday constraints, pain points and opportunities. Once completed we had collated all the data and found patterns in users perceptions and tasks; aggregated the findings in the form of a persona.

Key Findings

• The individuals were often lonely as they were scared to go out

• Individuals, due to the nature of the disease, were prone to forgetting tasks; some more than others

• Loud noises and motion would often attract the users attention

Ideation

Potential solution

The research made it evident how complicated and limiting the available options to the user were. We had quickly began to throw ideas onto the table of what specific aspects we could tackle with the app. We had narrowed down the solutions to an app which would allow the person suffering with dementia to connect with a “dementia friend” who would assist either in person or via video call.

User Journey flow

Working with the team we had created user journeys to help visualise and understand the whole user journey.

Design

Low-fidelity wireframes

Now that we had established a list of screens to cover the various scenarios, I had created wireframes to detail out the flows. Using the wireframes we had revised shuffled various screens to perfect the user journey flows.

High-Fidelity Prototype

The low-fidelity sketches were then turned into a high-fidelity prototype. This helped provide a clear picture of the final product. The high-fidelity prototype was then presented to the panel of judges and the rest of the competitors.

Project learning

What have I learned from this project?

• Being able to rapidly implement ideas into prototypes

• Always remembering the ‘why’. The primary goal is to understand the user, their problems and then come up with a design that solves it

• Process in essential. For a project that is vast, it gives you a roadmap to navigate through what can be a clouded confusing route