TAPSPEECH | GRAPHIC & UX/UI

Facilitating communication between verbally impaired elders and caretakers.

In July 2021, I participated in the City I&T Grand Challenge Hong Kong on a team of 9 students, placing first out of 1,250+ contestants in the Secondary School division. The Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated the vulnerability of Hong Kong's elderly population, particularly for those who are verbally impaired, increasing the severity of their communication challenges due to the isolation and limited support.

Hence we pitched Tapspeech, an app dedicated to supporting verbally impaired elders in care homes during this difficult time.

Find out more about the City I&T Grand Challenge↗ and our award↗ !

CURRENT SITUATION

Understanding the context and our current situation

With its rapidly aging population, the number of elders with verbal disabilities has only continued to grow concurrently in Hong Kong. This often overlooked group only experienced more difficulty during the pandemic, making verbal communication near impossible.

THE PROBLEM

Defining the problem and narrowing our scope

Our team started by individually mind mapping all the issues that verbally impaired elders could be facing on a daily basis. We then had a group discussion where we each took turns sharing our ideas, then wrote out a list of five main themes that we had gathered based on everyones thoughts.

TARGET AUDIENCE

Creating proto-personas

The team set our target audience to be all elderly and caretakers in care homes in Hong Kong. By government standards, residential care homes are available for elders age 65 or over, hence our primary target audience is verbally impaired elders above this age. The secondary target audience is all other elderly due to the impact of the pandemic, and the staff and caretakers taking care of these elders.

We developed the following proto-personas  based on this information:

USER SCENARIOS

How might our users use Tapspeech?

I also took charge of sketching out the following user scenarios during our group discussion, to better picture how our app could be used to help the communication between elders and caretakers.

DESIGN PROCESS

Iterating on the home page

As we were on a tight timeline for the competition, we were forced to rush through a lot of the design process. In this case it was acceptable as the competition only required a conceptualized design, but in reality there were many missing elements and the app would not function.

The patient home screen was one we spent the most time on, as we felt this was the most crucial screen in the whole app and was a huge part in whether our app was successful.

VISUAL BRANDING

Bringing the Tapspeech brand to life

We ended up prioritizing out time on branding, as we felt this was more important to deliver our message in the final pitch.
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As Tapspeech is mainly used by elders, we determined that we needed all visuals to be visually gentle and soothing, while providing high enough contrast for all text and images to be easily legible.

THE REDESIGN

6 months later ...

I decided to revisit the project and mockups we had made. I realized that although Tapspeech had a meaningful goal, the product simply would not function the way we intended as it was designed with only aesthetics in mind. This was mainly due to our lack of experience with UX at the time, and we simply did what felt right to make Tapspeech look like a functioning product.

I was keen to practice the skills I had developed and decided to independently work on refining the product.

PATIENT INTERFACE

Although it was mentioned during research, the technological literacy of elders wasn't really considered in the design. Many functions lacked visibility and accessibility, and overall was difficult for users to locate what they were looking for.

I redesigned this screen to make sure the Emergency Call feature is always accessible and easy for elders to use by placing the button larger and centered, and designing it to have double confirmation to limit accidental calling.

Patient home

Emergency call

Emergency confirmation

Patient assistance

CARETAKER INTERFACE

In contrast, the caretaker interface lacked many features that would help them manage the patients. The features were oversimplified which wasn't necessary as they generally would have better technological literacy. The pages were also visually similar and confusing to navigate.

I changed the design of the caretaker home page so they can see their most recent updates and daily schedule, they can then mark the requests as completed once done and check their patient list in the care home.

Caretaker home

Caretaker sidebar

Patient list

Caretaker requests