Case Study
Data Collection and the Senior Living Experience
background
TSOLife (The Story of Life) was founded in 2015 as an online platform for preserving life stories. The goal was to offer a place where you could leave your digital legacy to stand the test of time. Prior to when I joined the team, the CEO had designed and developed Version 1.0 of the TSOLife life story online platform.
One of my first experiences as part of the team was participating in the beta test of the V1.0 platform which included interviewing veterans at a local retirement community about their life stories. (And wow did they have some amazing stories!)
At this time, we were exploring a B2B SaaS revenue model. From our market research, we decided to focus our efforts on the senior living industry.
problem
We focused on the problem of how to help caregivers get to know their residents better.
Goal
The goal was to design a mobile app that would capture an interview between a senior living staff member and a senior living resident. The information collected in the interview would then be easily accessible by senior living staff.
my role
I initially started working with TSOLife in a volunteer capacity. Soon after, I was hired on as the first official hire by the company and later on recognized as a co-founder. I focused on helping the company identify product-market fit and drove product design and development.
the opportunity
The life stories that TSOLife captures hold valuable information about the resident. How do we help senior living staff access and leverage this information?
ideation & user research
We gained a much better understanding of our users, the problem we were trying to solve, and the solution we wanted to develop.
KEY INSIGHTS
Based on our experience conducting life story interviews, we found that residents greatly enjoyed the conversational format; however, interviewers needed a guide of what questions to ask to help with the conversation.
We gained an understanding of the process we were replacing. The traditional method of capturing resident data involved filling out paper forms upon their arrival. These forms were stored in a binder, which was difficult to use and infrequently referenced. As we delved deeper into the process and analyzed the data, a clear problem emerged. We learned that although every resident was supposed to have a completed paper resident profile form, less than 40% of the residents in a community had a form on file, and most of the forms were not completely filled out. This means that these communities were missing key data for the majority of their residents. A technical solution was needed with this process as the status quo was not working.
Existing market solutions that relied on video for capturing resident stories caused discomfort for both residents and staff. We opted to use only audio instead.
We learned more about our users and their environment. For example, we discovered that many senior living communities struggled with a poor Wi-F connection, so our mobile app needed to be able to function offline. Also, many of our users had limited technology literacy, so simplicity and ease of use would be key.
METHODS
Landscape Survey
Stakeholder Interviews
Competitive Analysis
User Personas
THE PROBLEM
The average senior living community was missing key social data on MORE THAN 40% of their residents.
design
The two key items that we needed to design were the mobile app and the conversation guide.
THE MOBILE APP
The mobile app was designed to be simple and easy to use. It allowed users to record conversations with residents seamlessly, allowing the user to focus on the conversation at hand without feeling inhibited or overwhelmed by the technology element.
THE CONVERSATION GUIDE
When creating the guide, we leveraged our existing experience conducting interviews, evaluated different versions of the current intake forms being used to see what questions they were asking and what information senior living communities felt was valuable in intake, and added questions to capture additional data that stakeholders would find relevant. The initial conversation guide included 60 questions in 13 categories. We practiced the conversation to identify the optimal question order and edited questions to achieve an average conversation length of 30 minutes.
tESTING & FEEDBACK
Product optimization was an ongoing process. We initially launched an internal test where users completed test cases and provided feedback. Feedback was additionally collected post-launch and updates were made in an iterative process.
METHODS
• Closed Testing Group With Test Cases
• User Interviews
• Data Analysis
• Screen Recordings
• Heatmaps
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We found that we needed to support more device and operating versions than previously expected. Many senior living communities were using older devices.
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To optimize the user experience, we made some updates to the interview questionnaire, such as reordering some questions to better support the conversation flow, and re-locating questions that were frequently skipped so the interviewer will be more likely to see them when conducting the interview.
For the mobile app, we made updates such as improving the search functionality to help staff more quickly locate the resident they want to interview, including alerts to prevent staff from abandoning an interview without saving, and offering a new uploads page for staff to see the upload status of their interviews.
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We updated the questionnaire to be more inclusive. By modeling our first version of the questionnaire off of existing paper forms, we had inherited some biases present in these forms.
This was mainly evident in the religion and faith section of the questionnaire. The main question was broad and open-ended; however, the follow-up supporting questions left the interviewer struggling if they were not personally familiar with the customs of a particular faith. To address this, we included various options for supporting questions to better guide the interviewer.
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We accounted for additional use cases to achieve the same goal of collecting data on every resident. Our staff users flagged situations where the core product was not suitable. With this information, we additionally started providing: (1) A paper form for non-verbal residents to complete, and (2) An interview guide specifically designed for family members to respond on behalf of residents who couldn't provide their own responses.
To address language disparities, we created translations and different versions of the questionnaire for different scenarios, such as: (1) When a resident spoke a different language and none of the staff members were fluent in that language, and (2) When both the resident and staff spoke the same non-English language
These additional user-friendly options helped the staff in the community collect social data on as many of their residents as possible.
FINDINGS & REFLECTIONS
Audio interviews are the optimal way to capture resident data. Customers who were using the TSOLife mobile app captured over 500% more data on their residents than those using traditional paper methods.
As we had suspected, the conversation was an enjoyable experience, with enhanced comfort over video on both the resident and staff side.
Simply capturing the data on the residents would not be enough. We needed to also present the collected data in a way that would provide value to stakeholders.
