BINGO
Designing a job matching platform for older adults
I recently received a grand prize at Go Studio Innovation Jam for the submission of designing a job matching platform for older adults. It was the most exciting thing ever since I started pursuing my career in user experience.
As you get older, people face physical, mental, and social challenges. In this hackathon, we participants were to develop ideas that lead to long-term solutions for aging in place by using emerging technologies.
How might we help older adults stay in their homes longer while maintaining their independence in a safer, healthier, and more cost-effective way?
Project Details
Team: Yuki Mochizuki (UX Designer ) & Steve Aguila (Product Designer)
Time Frame: 4 weeks
UX Process:
01. Exploration
02. Research & Define
03. Design
04. Prototype
05. Deliver
01. Exploring Ideas
We started off with a mind map to see which area of problems we should focus on.
We initially explored the medical-related product/service area and conducted user research. However, we quickly came to a deadlock to proceed with our initial ideas for a few reasons. Instead of continuing with our original plans, we decided to drastically shift our design concept from a medical product to a job matchmaking platform later. This is because the idea is completely new in the market and had the potential of tackling many problems today’s older adults are facing.
[Add why]
Older adults are facing these problems
02. Research & Define
In this phase, we tried to learn about general problems today’s older adults are facing, the potential users, the market, and emerging technologies to strategically design a solution for older adults.
General Research — Challenges Today’s older adults are facing
In addition to some facts about older adults’ challenges we learned during the kick-off, we did our research on the target demographic and narrowed down some of the key insights to solve.
- Healthcare costs over $11,000 per year when you’re over 65 years old
- Over 15 million (or roughly 1 in 3) older adults aged 65+ are economically insecure, with incomes below 200% of the Federal Poverty Level. (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2018)
- Nationally, 30% of workers over 65 say they have nothing saved in a retirement plan. There’s a growing number of seniors relying on Medicare and Medicaid. And, according to a recent Axios/Survey Monkey poll, boomers today have more debt than past generations.
We took a notice of the financial insecurity the older adults are facing and wanted to do something with it.
User Research — Older Adults are experienced in tech
While we were still exploring the medical-related solution ideas, we started off by conducting a screener survey by posting on Facebook communities among older adults and having user interviews. Although we didn't end up pursuing the route, we were still able to use some data from the survey.
One thing we noticed was that more than 60% of older adults aged between 55 to 74 own either computer, laptop, or tablet. Let alone, 90% of them own smartphones. In addition, more than 95% of them feel they are experienced in using digital technology. This data gave us confidence in designing a digital platform such as an app for job-seeking older adults that they would use by themselves.
Market Research — No Job Matchmaking tools for older adults
In order to understand how we could position ourselves in the market, we looked into some job search tools for general job seekers, as well as seekers specifically for older adults. Below is the matrix we created.
As you can see many services are mostly for long-term job opportunities. We didn’t see many job posting platforms for daily or hourly short-term temporary jobs.
In addition, many of these platforms only provide a space for job postings from the employer side and an application platform for the applicant side. But I believe none of them allow hiring people immediately within the platform.
After multi-layered researches, we came up with the idea of creating a job-matchmaking platform for older adults who seek short-term job opportunities.
Define — User Persona and Problem Statement
Due to the timing, instead of having another round of user interviews, we decided to skip the process and create persona hypnosis instead. In an ideal situation, we would conduct user interviews again, so that we would have tangible data to back up our ideas.
Here are two types of persona hypotheses we came up with.
- An older adult who is financially secured but seeks social connections through working casually working whenever he[She] is free
- An older adult who wants to work to support her[him]self.
Here is the problem statement.
As we age and retire the notion of living a luxuriate lifestyle may be beneficial for some but not for all. For some it may not be fulfilling enough to live that type of style and for others they may not have luxury to live that lifestyle.
Older adults today have outdated social norms and develop some form of mental disorders due to results of isolation during retirement. At the same time, more older adults tap into their retirement or pension often, and may require employment to maintain their lifestyle.
How might we offer opportunities for people later in life to find an hourly contract job without committing to part-time or full-time responsibilities to fulfill their needs?
02. Design
During the design phase, we started off with coming up with a design strategy. This includes considering what type of features we will need for this platform, what emerging technologies we could incorporate, and how we could make it as easy as possible for older adults to comfortably use.
Accessibility — Color and Text Size
We wanted to make sure that the color contrast is high and texts are large enough for older adults to read.
Color — We wanted to make sure that the text and background have enough color contrast. color is
- Insert color accessibility
- Text size
Onboarding — that’s all you need to do!
We were confident that our solution of a job matchmaking platform for short-term jobs was new and unique. We wanted to make this platform as easy as possible for the target audience to use. According to a study, the average time it takes to fill a given position is 42 days. Job search is a painful job for everyone, from sending out applications to going through rounds of interviews. But is it really necessary for short-term temporary jobs? What if we could instantly have a job just filling out all the necessary information and jobs will come to you?
[Insert mid-fi wireframes]
03. Prototype
- Voice user interface video
- Voice Interface
- One of the requirements of this hackathon was to incorporate emerging technologies in solutions. After exploring some emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), we decided to apply a voice interface to our platform. This is because it will help older adults to input their data easier and faster by talking to a device, rather than typing on a keyboard especially on a smartphone.
- the concept for employer-side — AI/machine learning — skill bubbles
Take away
- Data is the most important — wish we had time for user interviews
- story telling / presentation
- voice interface
