Circles

Circles is our Capstore Project at the University of Waterloo. It is a web application aimed at facilitating remote social interactions for older adults at risk of isolation. While we never got to rollout the product, it went through multiple rounds of user-centric design iteration to reach its final form. My role in this project focuses heavily on the research, design, testing and validation of our solution using engineering methdologies.

Overview

This poster gives a nice overview of the design process from start to finish.

One of my main focus was on the analysis of the problem space to come up with features required to address it. We started by creating personas for our targeted users based on research and user interviews with older adults. We then developed a list of requirements that our solution must meet in order to satisfy user-specific needs. Finally, we came up with a list of MVP features along with a system diagram to fully outline the different components needed.

I also worked very closely with our designer to optimize the usability of the interface for older adults. One of the most important aspects was to know how to evaluate our design both qualitatively and quantitatively. We used a lot of design principles and guidelines to evolve our design starting with some simple wireframes to eventually the higher-fidelity prototype.

User testing is crucial to a participatory and user-centric design process. we often held user forum sessions as well as in-person testing to validate our prototypes.