Injoy is an app designed to help the elderly transition smoothly into retirement. It was developed during SCAD Startup—a weeklong design sprint with over 100 teams. Our team secured third place and won a $2,000 prize. My role involved conducting research to inform key project decisions and designing the final UI.
Design Competition
March 2024
1 week
UX Designer
Business Analyst
Service Designer
Animate
Figma
Canva
Photoshop
Based on conversations with Reed, personalized activity recommendations will appear here. Users can explore event details, confirm their availability, and save events they’re interested in for later viewing.
The chatbot, Reed, interacts with users to understand their needs and how the app can assist them. Based on these conversations, it recommends activities in the area tailored to the user's interests and preferences.
There are three available plans on the app:
Reed Recommends has the basic
chatbot functionality and recommends nearby events
Reed Plans suggests personalized
events and automatically adds the events to the user’s preferred
calendars, sends reminders, and shares event details with loved
ones.
Reed Cares targets people with
medical conditions. It processes the user’s medical information
to encourage more personalized discussions with Reed.
The competition prompt was 'Breaking barriers, and unleashing potential.' In our first meeting, we broke it down and discussed what it meant to each of us. Ideas ranged from learning new skills to challenging gender and racial stereotypes. However, we all agreed on one common goal: to make the user feel empowered. One team member shared an emotional story about her mother, who was forced into retirement at 65 and struggled to find purpose afterward. This story resonated deeply with us, sparking our interest and driving us to explore the issue further.
We grounded our design decisions in solid evidence, relying primarily on secondary data due to the project's short timeline. With our product targeting recent retirees, we defined our audience as individuals aged 57 to 65. Here are some key insights we discovered.
"One out of three retirees worldwide suffers from depression"
(Pabón-Carrasco et al 2020)
“By 2040, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that 80 million U.S. citizens-almost a quarter of the population-will be age 65 or older.”
(Population reference Bureau)
“Two in five adults 50-plus don’t feel technology is designed with older adults in mind, citing the offerings’ complexity, poor user experience, and insufficient training materials.”
(AARP.org)
“About 58% of people aged 65 and older believe that it is normal for people to get depressed as they grow older.”
(Mental Health America)
We discovered that the problem was far more extensive than we initially anticipated. As technology advanced, an entire generation was being left behind. The data we collected helped us empathize with our users, enabling us to define the problem statement and craft the ideal user experience.
I feel disconnected and aimless as I face the drastic change in lifestyle presented by retirement.
I feel empowered as I approach retirement because Injoy keeps me active and makes the activities I enjoy easily accessible.
To streamline the UI design process, we established a set of ground rules. These design directives were carefully tailored to suit our target audience. Every UI design followed three core principles:
Buttons must be at least 40px tall and wide
Color contrast must comply with WGAC AAA
Font must be Atkinson Hyperlegible (>16px)
Home
Chatbot
Activity Page
Subscriptions