Problem

How can we encourage seniors to dine out and improve their user experience for choosing their favourite restaurants?

There is still a large potential in the mobile application market especially when it comes to those apps designed for seniors. Based on the Elder Research conducted by Sheridan Centre, it shows that only 35 percent of smartphone users are between 65 to 74 year old. In other words, we can commit more efforts to enlarge the percentage of this user group by including their special needs during the design process and subsequently creating an all-age friendly application.

It is important to encourage seniors to actively participate in various kinds of social events while enjoying their retirement and daily life. Dining in a restaurant could be one of the feasible approaches to provide a comfortable vibe for elders to create significant bonding among individuals and make friends.

Solution

The idea: Create a clean, simple, and sufficient onboarding instruction experience to help seniors to engage the process of setting up their preferences. For the part of step by step guide, we also want to ensure the senior users with disability can actively interact with the app without too much difficulty.

For Example, the onboarding instruction process will provide the options for users to choose the text sizes of the menu, restaurant interior lighting level, favourite cuisines, and whether wheelchair accessible, smart spoon and grab bar features facilities are provided by the restaurant.

After users are done with the preference set up, the app will collect the data and output a list of restaurants that match their requirements.

Research

In order to provide a better experience for elderly users,I start to think about the text size of the menu, restaurant interior lighting, wheelchair accessible, smart spoon, and the grab bar features.

Providing the best experience for elderly users, I start to think about the text size of the menu, restaurant interior lighting, wheelchair accessible, smart spoon, and the grab bar features.

I had conducted few interviews with some senior people from Sheridan Center For Elder Research and some of my family members, to find out what are their preferences about a good restaurant and then specifically focused on both the special services and facilities that a restaurant can offer to them. I did an Empathy Map and PACT(People, Activities, Contexts, and Technologies) Analysis.

I’ve also done some research about two popular finding restaurant apps, Zomato and OpenTable, and analyzed these two apps and see their usabilities, visual designs, and Information Architecture. I also browsed different websites and came out with different ideas.

Design Process

Chef Choice is an individual mobile app design project. My design evolved along with several rounds of iteration during different stages.

After I gathered all the required information from the users' interviews, browsed different sites and came out with different ideas, I started with brainstorming to generate ideas for the user flow, first draft, wireframes, and style. Based on the first user feedback from others, I converted feedback into necessary modification. Then I created a medium and high fidelity prototype and had people from Sheridan Elder Research Center to conduct user testing. From there I continued to have more feedback which allowed me to further modify my design and then build a higher fidelity prototype.