Secondary Research
Chinese are the largest Asian American ethnic group aged 65 and older. However, their needs for seeking romantic relationships and/or domestic partnerships are not always recognized, let alone being met with the limited social and technological resources they have.
(Challenges for the Chinese Elderly in the dating world)
Out of all of the challenges that Chinese elderly immigrants face, the ones that we decided to focus on are to close the digital divide and remove language barriers to make online dating apps more accessible for this particular group. To achieve this goal, a few things need to be taken into considerations:
• Culture has a great influence on individuals’ dating preferences and dating patterns. Understanding what the Chinese elderly are looking for in an intimate relationship and how they prefer to connect with others in a social context is very important to the success of an app that helps them look for a partner.
• The UX design of Chinese and western apps are different. More than 80% of Chinese American older adults were born outside of the U.S. and more than 30% of them have come to the U.S. after the age of sixty. (Jiang, 2016) Despite their length of time in the US, most of them are still mainly using Chinese apps and thus more familiar with the look and feel the Chinese mobile app design.
• Design for accessibility. Studies have shown that more positive computer attitudes, especially regarding comfort and interest, were related to greater computer usage. Therefore, creating a smooth, comfortable and relaxing user experience rather than a stimulating and complex one is core to the success of designing for the elderly.
Goals & Strategies
How might we create a comfortable online dating experience for the Chinese American elderly?
After doing extensive secondary research, we came up with 3 strategies to guide our design process later on. These strategies are designed to best cater to the needs and appeals of the Chinese American elderly when looking to enter or explore the dating world.
(Design strategies)
Strategy 1: Design for collaboration between the elderly and their children. We realized that the elderly might want to use some help from their children to navigate digital interfaces. Therefore, we want to take into consideration this potential collaboration between the two parties when designing the app.
Strategy 2: Skeuomorphic design. Through research and observation, we decided that e-books are the most pervasive digital products used by Chinese elderly. Therefore, to match their conceptual model better, we want to make certain interactions in the app similar to their interactions with e-books — for example, use the flipping page effect to replace the left/right swipe in the common dating apps, and make the text/image layout more similar to that of the physical prints like newspapers and magazines.
Strategy 3: Dual-language support. In oder to remove the language barriers for the Chinese elderly while allowing for collaboration between them and their perceivably English-speaking children, we decided that the app should support both English and Chinese languages and make it very easy to switch between the two anytime and anywhere during the app experience.
Personas
Consolidating all the data and insights from the previous stages, we were able to identify two user groups for our product: the primary user group is the Chinese elderly who are living in the US and looking for an intimate relationship, while the secondary user group being their children who hope to help them find a partner.
We then identified the different pain points and goals that the two user groups have, and made a persona for each of them.
(Primary persona: Elderly)
(Secondary persona: Child)
An interesting connection between the two personas is that, in addition to their common goal of finding a reliable partner for the elderly (Xin Fong), they both want to make life easier for the child (Amber) and other family members. Caring for an elderly parent while starting a new family and raising kids at the same time can be overwhelming. By finding herself a partner, Xin Fong not only wants to be in a romantic relationship but also hopes to lessen the burdens for her daughter Amber.
This is an important motivation that’s worth pointing out and taking into consideration whet it comes to product development, marketing and campaign in the long run.
Prototypes & User Testing
After discussion, we decided that the most critical red route for redesigning is the onboarding process, during which the user will set up their profile before they can enter the main screen of the app and browse other people’s profiles.
The original onboarding experience in Hinge is very long and tedious. In fact, many people gave up on the app altogether in the middle of setting up their profile, due to the extensive amount of steps required to complete in order to finish the process. Therefore, one of our main goals in redesigning the onboarding experience is to simplify the process, keeping only the necessary sections and leaving additional information to be filled after the user enters the main screen.
Other things to take into considerations are: redesign questions about personal information and preferences that matter the most to the Chinese elderly; make UI elements easy to understand and interact with; give helpful instructions for certain steps such as taking/uploading a photo.
Paper Prototypes
In the next step, we created paper sketches of the onboarding process and conducted a rapid user testing with 5 prospective users of the app.
(Paper prototypes)
“There are too many questions. It’s annoying.” — anonymous participant
Even though we tried to skim off some unnecessary questions for profile setting, many people still found it too long to complete. After carefully weighing all the options we have, we still decided to keep all the questions we included in the setting, as they are all important information to gather. However, we decided that we should reorganize the questions and adjust the layout so that these questions feel easier to answer and the process feels shorter.
Some other issues raised by the participants are:
• Question about the meaning of “deal breakers”. In our next iteration, we need to make a clear distinction between “preferences” and “deal breakers” so that the user understands better what setting these parameters means to their interaction with other users.
• Don’t know how to edit one’s information. After completing all the questions, some users wanted to make changes to some of the answers. There should be a way to edit the entries in the end on the preview page.
• “What if I don’t want to upload a photo of my own?” Some users expressed their reluctance towards uploading their personal photos to the app. Considering the special needs and concerns that some elderly might have, there should be an alternative for them to use an avatar/default photo instead, in the case that they don’t want to upload a real photo of themselves.
Low-fidelity Prototypes
Learning from the results of the user testing with paper prototypes, we made some revisions to solve the proposed issues and created low-fidelity clickable prototypes in Figma. We then used these interactive prototypes to conduct a second round of user tests with 5 new participants.
(Low-fidelity prototypes)
“How can I change to the Chinese interface?” — anonymous participant
The biggest usability issue that surfaced from this second round of user tests is that users don’t know how to switch languages inside the app. This undermined our intention from the beginning, which is to remove language barriers for the Chinese elderly. Therefore, we gave it the highest priority to solve this issue in our next iteration.
Another important feedback from a middle-age participant is that she thought elderly, like her own mother, might need bigger buttons. Later when we were creating the style guide, we kept this in mind and made sure the button design is elderly-friendly.
High-fidelity Prototypes
Next, we created a style guide that abides by the rules of accessible design — making sure the typefaces, font sizes, colors and buttons all suffice for legibility, readability and comprehension.
(Style guide)
Then, we created the high-fidelity prototypes in Figma, locking in some key features that we focused on for this redesign challenge.
(Key frames)
Marketing
In addition to design, we brainstormed a few marketing ideas.
Reflection
Timely and clear communication is key to the success of teamwork. Learning from past experiences, my teammates and I went out of our way this time to ensure that everyone is on the same page and updated with each other’s work progress. We used a collaborative Google Doc for text-based research, while using Figma for image-based communications such as gathering visual references, making a mood board, and co-creating low- and high-fidelity prototypes.
The one thing that I wished we did differently, though, is to also use a real-time collaboration tool like Figma, instead of Adobe Illustrator, to create the style guide. It was extremely difficult to keep track of the latest version of the style guide, as we all revised it individually and separately in our own Adobe Suite, and eventually jammed our Google Drive folder with numerous versions of the style guide with nuanced differences.
