Digital Calendar for the Elderly

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The objective of this project, was the development of an application that could help elderly people in their daily activities.

This project was developed during 6 months in my first year of the Master (Computer Science - Multimedia Systems) at Instituto Superior Técnico.http://www.ist.utl.pt/
It was developed with Microsoft Expression Blend 4.http://www.microsoft.com/expression/produhttp://www.silverlight.net/
It was developed with a Participatory Human Centered Design cycle:

design, test, evaluate, listen and redesign.

Ientifying Stakeholders:
We were proposed to develop an application to help elderly people in their daily activities: home support, social networks, group activities, volunteer work, etc..

Having that in mind, we tried to figure out some possible stakeholders:
Base Stakeholders: Supplier Stakeholders: Satellite Stakeholders:

Interviews:
We used semi-structured interviews to gather the maximum information of users' needs.
Users' most needs:Application requirements:Paper requirements:

Cultural Probes

To "extract" some more information from our final users, we used cultural probes. With them we tried to encourage users to have new ideas. We focused on identifying three aspects:

One of the tasks in the cultural probes:

Workshops
We did workshops with the elderly so that they could evolve in the design of the system.
Card Sorting: This technique consists in the creation of several concepts and asking the users to group them in the order they prefer.
CARD: This technique is used to explore the users' workflow with the help of cards with images or scenes. We created the following scenario to evaluate their workflow:
With the elderly opinions we found that the calendar application had to mimic the functionality of a paper calendar. This is, all the tasks need to be done in the most direct way possible, without having several sub-menus.