Week 12: Rethinking with COVID-19

In the past few weeks, we are trying to process events happening in the world with COVID-19.

Even the way we contact each other and pass ideas, share our thoughts, had changed. The main platform we use to contact each other and our users is Zoom.

Also, we had to rethink and try to understand what is best for our users in this situation. In this period of time, it is obvious that our target audience is in the spotlight. Many ventures that had risen try to help them, from food and necessities to conversations and mental help.

One of our purposes was to create a contact between volunteers and the elderly, to help them feel more comfortable with the technology and to get them closer to our world.

With that said, since the elderly are considered at risk because of past illness and their age, we do not want to make any physical contact with them, in order to prevent any spreading infectious disease as COVID-19.

One of our main principles was that besides helping them, we encourage the elderly to learn and process the solution given to them by the volunteer. A lot of different ideas were suggested, among them were a digital book, an updating google-doc, pdf, printed guide. In order to determine what the elderly prefer best, we are proceeding with user testing and try to see what is their favorite choice of getting the needed information.

One of the concepts we thought might be good to implement is to pass the application for the elderly and replace it with a physical button, that once they press this button, a request is sent to all the volunteers. Once a volunteer accepted the request, he makes a call to the elderly and helps him or her in their issue.

So currently we are developing the app for the volunteer, with the thought of implementing a physical button.