SKILLA
January 2023
Haiyi Liang | Yifeng Yang | Yuqing Yang | Ziheng Tang
Skilla is a skill exchange platform designed for the elderly, aimed at helping them share their skills, make new friends, and learn new ones to combat loneliness. Although we are designed for the elderly, young people can also learn skills here to make our user base more diverse. Users can easily acquire the skills and knowledge they need by posting skills, searching for skills, and interacting with other users on the platform while sharing their professional knowledge and hobbies with others. Skilla is committed to creating a friendly, safe, and easy-to-use community that allows users to connect and interact anytime, anywhere, and enjoy various pleasures in life.
PROJECT STATEMENT
We plan to design an intervention to help seniors who experience loneliness due to factors such as the loss of a spouse, retirement, or not living with children by thinking about how technology can best support the life of the elderly and enhance the fun of life of the elderly.
Our target audience for this project is the elderly. Because compared with the mainstream young people who follow the trend, the senior user group is easily ignored by various social applications and activities.
MARKET ANALYSIS
Social isolation among seniors is a growing concern, with over 30% of Canadian seniors at risk. This is particularly worrying given that the senior population is expected to increase from 15% to 23-25% by 2036. Studies show that social isolation negatively affects mental and physical health, and can lead to increased healthcare costs. In fact, a 2017 U.S. study found that Medicare spends $6.7 billion on additional federal healthcare costs related to loneliness among the elderly. Therefore, finding ways to combat social isolation among seniors is crucial for promoting healthy aging and reducing healthcare costs.
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Currently, the young and elderly groups have different states and need when facing loneliness. Therefore, it is difficult for social or mindfulness apps to achieve an excellent inclusive design. Furthermore, it is difficult for them to consider every age group.
The users of strangers' social apps on the current market are people under 35. Target users are mainly between 18 and 44, and core users are primarily between 18 and 34.
Mindfulness application software is not particularly popular in the current market, so there are no specific data statistics for now. Because of this, they may be more difficult for seniors to use.
PRIMARY RESEARCH
The purpose of our first primary research is to obtain a general portrait of the target group, so we chose to take the residents of the elderly apartment as the questionnaire survey object. Because according to secondary research, we found that seniors who live in elderly apartments feel lonely more often than seniors who live with their families.
Q1. Have you ever suffered from loneliness?
Q2. What did you do against loneliness?
SKILL & HOBBY
Through the communication with the interviewees in primary research 1, we noticed that most seniors think that focusing on their hobbies is a good way to combat loneliness, which we did not realize during the early brainstorming.
PET
Another point worthy of our attention is that many participants agreed that keeping pets is a good way to combat loneliness for most seniors, so we think that it may be possible to generate some potential solutions around pets
USER DEFINITION
We created our persona based on the information we gathered in our primary research.1 We believe our users are older adults who desire to be seen for their self-worth and are eager to share their hobbies, skills, and lives with others. Based on this result, we decided to continue our detailed primary research around pets and skills or hobbies, so we conducted user interviews to address these ideas.
Quotes from user interviews in our second primary research
SKILLS TRADE
According to user interviews, we think skill trade is a feasible idea, but if we want to improve the solution centered on skill trade, we need to consider:
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How to encourage users to participate in trading skills
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How to make the process of learning new skills easier
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How to maintain users' enthusiasm for learning and application loyalty
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How to protect user security
PET
In the user interview, the interviewee mentioned a point that we neglected, that is, if we think about our solution around pets, it means that we exclude the group of seniors who are allergic to pets from the target users.
Therefore, considering that our solution will try our best to serve all seniors, we gave up the solutions related to pets.
SOLUTION
Based on our research, we decided to use skills trade as an ending solution to help older adults combat loneliness.
Before proposing a specific solution, we thought it would be helpful to first identify the problem to be solved.
For example, "How can we help older adults increase their value in the community?" "How can we help seniors develop new skills/trades?".
Therefore, we conducted a "How Might We" campaign.
We completed the HMW through the analysis of primary data. We came up with five areas to focus on in this activity. They are user loyalty, user-friendly design, function, security, and purpose.
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Customer loyalty: How can our product attract users, and how can we encourage and support our target audience to use the product?
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User-Friendly Design: How do we design inclusive products?
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Function: How can we build a skills trading platform suitable for seniors?
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Security: How do we protect the privacy and information of our users (seniors and volunteers)?
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Purpose: How do we make users feel valuable in our products?
USER FLOW
PROTOTYPE
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