HEALTHPAL x aarp

Duration: 4 months | Skills: UX Design and UX Research

Teammates: Aarushi Banerjee, Vidur Khanna, Yi Liu, Pradyumna Yoganarashimhan

Collaborating with Cornell Tech engineering and business students, our team worked with AARP (American Association of Retired Persons). AARP is a non-profit organization that discovers, supports, and scales ideas that will help empower million of people to choose how they live as they age. With guidance from our company advisor, Brittne Kakulla, we developed and built a vision for a digital product to create an impact on public health, tapping into the high growth in AgeTech arena.

Industry Research

Based on HMW question, we wanted to first learn about online education industry which led to conducting intensive industry research in various aspects - incumbents, challengers, digital challengers, and competitors. While doing this, we have also analyzed demand and supply side to find product opportunity to enhance accessibility for older adults.

About EdTech industry:

According to Forbes, even before the pandemic, Research and Markets forecasted the growth of the online education market up to $350 billion by 2025. As predicted, the industry is becoming competitive. When searching for challengers, we found two distinct patterns in this industry, as shown below. Characteristics that all of the challengers share are that they continuously evolve by creating distinct features and distributing not only informative, but also specialized, classes to engage a wide range of people.

EXPLORATORY USER INTERVIEWs

We conducted 32 interviews with older adults who ranged from 54 - 92 years old to understand how older adults utilize technologies and how they access new information. These interviews led us to identify user behavior and common pain points that the older adults are facing.

After conducting user interviews, we extended our research further in order to validate and gather more supporting data. In this way, we were able to better understand users’ needs and confirm potential opportunity to implement AgeTech in health and wellness.

We identified 4 key insights based on our interviews and research:

1. Older adults face difficulties when accessing new technologies.

2. The learning style of users differ significantly, depending on their exposure to technology, not of their age.

3. Existing health and wellness platforms dedicated for older adults are not user-friendly for them.

4. There are high demands for learning about health and wellness.

RICH PICTURE

Based on our research, we created Rich Picture to communicate outcomes of our industry research and stakeholder research. This intends to convey not just the relationships between various players, but also their concerns.

How might we reimagine accessible online education for later in life learners (50+)?

IDEATION AND PROTOTYPE

Individually, I generated business opportunities, ideating from different perspectives – identifying and decomposing cool innovations and trends, understanding underserved niche market segments, thinking of ways that I can focus on one customer segment to streamline operations, and eliminating aspects that are not valuable to the focal segment.

After ideating individually, we collected 48 unique concepts from 100+ ideas. Amongst those, we used Darwinator and Peer Group to narrow down into top 10 ideas. Amongst the 10, we were able to come up with one final idea after rounds of user interviews and low-fi prototype to validate our idea.  

Our Solution

healthpal is a web-based service that specializes in physical health content for older adults. By providing short-form videos that are carefully curated and designed by geriatric health experts, healthpal provides educational content that enables older adults to add healthier routines in their daily lives.

RISK assessment - Experiment Design 1

Risk 1: Older adults might not benefit from bite-sized videos.

Our team conducted an experiment to de-risk an unknown associated with our venture. In this experiment, we wanted to collect the data that would mitigate risk 1. We designed our experiment as to showing 10 older adults 2 videos each on basic Yoga poses. One was 2 minutes in length, and the other one was 30 minutes in length. After the older adults watched each video, we observed them to gather the following metrics:

1. Retention immediately after watching the video

2. Difficulty in performing the exercise

Experiment 1 results:

• Users performed better with bite-sized content 

• Retention rate was at least 2x better when compared to the longer video  

• Older adults were able to complete the exercises with more ease

• Most of the exercises offered on current platforms are lengthy and can’t be performed by older adults

From Experiment 1, we have concluded that exercises offered through bite-sized videos are more favorable for older adults, as the size of the content leads to better retention and lesser strain on their bodies.

According to Pew Research Center, we have confirmed that 77% of older adults go online and have cellphones in 2021, while the number was much lower in April 2012. Despite the gain, 41% of older adults still do not actively use the Internet. Even though we essentially want to target users who are somewhat comfortable with technology, our team wanted to ensure that HealthPal is easy to navigate and allows users to quickly find the videos that they are interested in.

To avoid the long wait times and hassle associated with human technical support, our team created a mid-fidelity prototype to test whether a guided tour of the website will be useful for older adults.

Mid-fi Prototype & Usability testing

We evenly divided our testing group:

• Group A (Control Group)

  We asked them to do a navigation task (e.g: find a video related to stretching) on a prototype that does not contain the guided tour. Only phone help is available for this group when they have questions.

• Group B (Test Group)

  We asked them to do a navigation task (e.g: find a video related to stretching) on a prototype with a guided tour. They will only have a guided tour available to them.

We are comparing the time it takes for both groups to complete the task. Also, we will be counting the number of questions or calls that we have received to measure if a guided tour is valuable. 

Hypothesis: If the time for the test group ranges between 2 - 5 minutes (our expected estimated time for users to complete the task because our target audience is tech-savvy to a certain degree), then we will only keep a guided tour.

Experiment 2 results:

• Neither group significantly performed collectively better than the other group. Users took roughly 1 to 3 minutes completing tasks with both guided tours and phone support. 

• Users in the experiment earlier & intuitively figured out controls without either form of help.  

• Our target audience is fairly tech-savvy older adults.

• Current platform functions are fairly simplistic and straightforward.

From Experiment 2, we concluded that the guided tour may not be necessary for our current set of functionalities because users can navigate through the website without any help. We would have to conduct extensive experiments with a longer series of different tasks and situations.

Reflection & Learning outcomes

This project has been a very positive collaborative experience with Computer Science and MBA students from Cornell Tech. Cornell Tech Product Studio curriculum has taught me to think about AARP’s business model and how to conduct industry research and user research to find areas of opportunities. Furthermore, while there may be an existing product, uncovering and validating a point of distinction to others are vital. Building a product or service is not linear, rather it is a wholistic process where it values multiple perspectives from different fields.

Here are some key learning outcomes from researching and making of healthpal:

• Older adults can have diverse capabilities when it comes to exercising. It is important to identify our user persona before proceeding with the product.

• During experiments, the way we phrase questions to users of a different generation matters a lot, as much of the confusion from experiment #2 was about what we asked as opposed to completing the task. As a team, we should decide upon a concise, standard way of asking interviewees our questions (word-for-word). 

• A product that caters to the needs of older adults must have age-inclusive user interfaces.

• Before we actually ran through our experiment, we had certain expectations. However, the experiment results did not actually align with our hypothesis. We have learned that experiment results do not always necessarily come out as we expect. 

Next Steps:

1. Partner with a yoga instructor to create a Yoga-101 course and release the MVP

2. Partner with more geriatric experts to create wellness content

3. Redesign UX based on learnings and expand to other geographies