Problem Context

As part of the HEALTH-E group, I led a multi-phase research program to understand the opportunity for new wellness technology for older adults. The problem space was broad: while interest in building these tools was high, there was a significant gap in understanding older adults' real-world needs, attitudes, and the usability barriers of existing technology.

My Approach: A Multi-Phase Program

I designed and led a progressive, multi-phase research program that moved from broad discovery to specific, validated concepts.

• Foundational Discovery: We began with foundational research, where I designed and facilitated focus groups to uncover core attitudes, needs, and concerns around wellness technology. Through a rigorous qualitative analysis, we identified key themes related to privacy, challenges using technology due to aging-related changes, and the disconnect between existing tools and their actual wellness goals.

• Evaluative Research: To ground our findings, I then designed and moderated a usability study on a commercially available wellness tool. This allowed us to observe firsthand the specific usability challenges older adults faced, and we synthesized these observations into a clear set of design heuristics and anti-patterns to avoid.

• Strategic Ideation: Armed with insights from our foundational and evaluative work, I led the team in a series of design ideation workshops. We used our research to brainstorm new concepts and translated the most promising ideas into storyboards. We then presented these concepts to a stakeholder group of older adults, not just for validation, but also to gather feedback that further refined our understanding and the concepts themselves.

The Outcome

The outcome of this multi-phase program was a body of work that provided a clear, evidence-based direction for designing new wellness tools for this audience. Our work provided a more nuanced, data-driven understanding of older adults as a user group, creating a solid foundation for future inquiry in the field. The rigor of this work was validated externally, with each research phase contributing to peer-reviewed publications that covered our findings, methodology, and resulting design concepts.