eRetirements
Executive Summary
How can we help retirees find the right place to relocate to? We helped this Northwestern startup refine their offering and digital interaction
The focus of this project was on understanding retirees and ‘planners’ through ethnographic research. Conducted UI usability testing and multiple rounds of prototyping
Personal Responsibilities
Project framing and directions
Client engagement
Research lead
Visual communications
Deliverables
Heuristic evaluation of current UI/UX
Interaction redesign
Insights and research findings report
Retirement is around the corner
With an increasing number of retirees emerging from the working class, eRetirements (a NU start-up coming out of The Garage accelerator) has decided to make the transition between working and retirement as flawless as possible.
eRetirements offers personalized relocation recommendations through a 20 question online quiz.
So how can we use HCD and interaction design principles to improve the experience?
Research
Understanding this new and unique demographic is of paramount importance for this project; unlike many of our users, retirees have very different needs and aspirations than we do. We observed and immersed ourselves in their lives through various techniques but most importantly through in depth interviews with both planners and retirees. We also used eRetirements' previous research, secondary research into existing services, and surveys of current and prospective eRetirements users.
Insights
1. "I'm not like everyone else" - people live unique lives and want a service that can address their lifestyle choices and capabilities.
2. Unique and complex criteria - every planner goes into retirements with criteria that are special to them and that they rank differently from everyone else.
3. Retirees have criteria they want (emotional) to consider and criteria they have (logistics) to consider.
4. The current population of planners wants to transition (over a number of many years) into retirement instead of jumping right into it.
5. Finally, retirees want to have a purpose and spend their time productively with people of similar lifestyles. These people they trust the most for recommendations and more.
Goal
To create a personalized and trustworthy experience that empowers people planning to retire to make educated decisions
Paper & parallel & hi-fi prototyping
We decided to focus on the interaction in the beginning of the eRetirements journey.
eRetirements already does a great job providing city information once the user has gone through the quiz. We decided to split our experience into primary and secondary criteria; the primary being more emotional while the secondary are more logical. We used paper prototyping to parallel test multiple interactions and approaches. Once those were tested we moved on to Hi-Fi prototyping using proto.io.
Final design
We created a polished version of our most successful design. This design reflects of our users' needs and aspirations.
We made sure to incorporate transparency and clarity, high levels of safety, easy and clear navigation as well as more natural and intuitive interactions.
Heuristic evaluation
We also conducted a heuristic evaluation of the current website in order to provide step solutions as well as stretch solutions. We created a quick redesign of the website to reflect quick solutions we heard during research.