Staying Sharp with AARP

Project Lead | Client Manager | User Research |

Conceptual Sketching | Interaction Design

PROJECT BACKGROUND

The Problem: Uncover and design ways to add value to the Staying Sharp product for their subscribers.

The users: Staying Sharp is an offering for people who are interested in: (a) a science-based assessment that identifies opportunities to enhance your brain health, (b) improving their overall health and wellness, and (c) playing online games that are scientifically proven to improve brain health.

The Problem:

‘Brain health’ isn’t a term you hear too often. When asked about health, most people think about their physical fitness, nutritional health, or mental wellness. Rarely do we think about keeping our brain healthy.

The Staying Sharp program empowers people to protect and strengthen their brain health through a set of daily and weekly activities recommended based on a science-backed assessment.

Staying Sharp is one of AARP's first digital products. They reached out to Cooper, the consulting firm I was working with at the time, to add more value to AARP members through their brain health, a science-backed game-like experience called Staying Sharp.

The Process:

• Stakeholder interviews

• Alignment workshop

• Ethnographic Research

• Conceptual Exploration

• Storyboard Concept Testing

• Detailed Design

• Comprehension + Usability Research

• “Final” Designs

BUILDING ALIGNMENT

Starting the project off, we facilitated an alignment workshop where we (1) defined project success, (2.) defined the type value add they were looking for, and (3) co-created provisional personas that would serve as a knowledge sharing tool as well at baseline for recruiting participants based on behavior and potential value adds (versus demographics).

DIVERGING AND CONVERGING

During the first of many rounds of research, we conducted interviews with AARP members who self-identified with a set of predefined behaviors indicating they’d be qualified potential users of the brain health platform. The goal of this research was to understand:

People’s mental model of brain health (including past experience, personal goals, and expectations around a brain health platform) to inform the framework of the Staying Sharp platform

How people tackle personal or professional goals to help inform the way Staying Sharp would position goals and achievement within the platform

How people address some of the key brain health challenges that people face every day (e.g., stress, lack of sleep, inability to focus) to define the key value propositions for the staying sharp platform

Based on this insight and our learnings from working with the client team, we used personas as an empathy tool throughout the project and a set of experience attributes to ensure alignment with the client’s product strategy.

What makes these personas different and valuable?

These personas focused on information that was pertinent for designing a brain health, science-backed game-like experience:

• Current brain health understanding

• Current gaming behaviors

• Why they engage with games, quizzes, etc. (e.g., self-motivation, competition, fun?)

Additionally, we utilized Design Principles as a set of guiding value adds to members based on this research.

We then crafted conceptual storyboard that told the story of the primary persona’s experience with three directional solutions that aligned with the business aspirations and the target audiences primary needs.

These concepts included:

1.
A Chatbot that nudged you daily to make small lifestyle changes
Actionable | Educational | Credible

2.
A social-good tool that asked you to answer a set of questions each day to support brain health awareness
Socially Engaging | Educational | Actionable

3.
An assessment tool that allowed you to better understand where you are with your brain health and track progress towards self-defined goals
Actionable | Educational | Credible

Using these storyboards, we tested the ideas with a subset of potential users to help us not only narrow down the design, but also solve the larger problem of providing more value in a brain health platform.

Ultimately, the audience was most interested in the flexibility and transparency of the third direction, an assessment tool that allowed you to better understand where you are with your brain health and track progress towards self-defined goals.

DESIGN CHALLENGE

We started diving deeper into the design direction, which always brings up additional design challenges. We solved these challenges by creating and testing two conceptual designs that used these points of differentiation as the backbone of the concept.

Key Challenge: Single or modular assessment

Looking at the assessment itself, we worked with the AARP science team to determine if the assessment should be taken in a single sitting or in a modular fashion. From the users perspective, taking only the relevant portions of the (30-minute) assessment was ideal. The AARP Science team felt that a lot of additional data and value in the assessment being taken in a single sitting.

During testing, users found more value in the flexibility of the modular assessment over the added data that was provided from an assessment taken in a single sitting.

Key Challenge: Brain Health Pillars or Outcomes

We found that we could align the results of the assessment with either the AARP Brain health pillars (i.e, Relax, Discover, Connect, Nourish, Move) or behavioral outcomes (e.g., reduce stress, stay active, eat better).

During testing, users expressed feeling the behavioral outcomes results being more clear and actionable that the brain health pillars.

Key Challenge: Build your own or prescriptive experience

The assessment itself was intended to be taken every 90 days. Based on your results, the Brian Health Platform intended on supporting users by providing an action plan (focused on small lifestyle changes) to better your brain health through either a build-your-own or prescriptive approach.

During testing users rejected the prescriptive approach and advocated for an experience that allowed them to choose the aspects of their lifestyle that they would like to tackle (first).

A PIVOT FROM MOBILE TO WEB:

Sometimes we just don’t have the right resources in place to achieve the ideal solution. Midway through this project, AARP asked us to shift our focus from a mobile app to a web experience. Their anticipated mobile resources fell through but we were able to gain access to even more web resources!

THE RESULT

The final experience provided added value to Staying Sharp subscribers in 2 highly-impactful ways:

A flexible science-based assessment that gave subscribers the choice to choose the most relevant focuses for them

A set of actionable recommendations that focused on achievable outcomes for subscribers

In the end, I am most proud of the work I did to support a client in achieving a deeper understanding of their audience, their product, and the user experience field as a whole.

The AARP Staying Sharp team left the engagement with the aspirational value-add solution they were looking for. The new Staying Sharp experience is live now and accessible to anyone.