In Sai Kung District, there are about 110 villages and 10,000 elderlies aged above 65 living in the suburb. Due to its remoteness and the inconvenient transportation, The current public resource allocation mechanism has failed to respond to the needs of rural elderly care such as public facilities and medical services in Sai Kung. Moreover, “families of elderly doubletons” are very common in Sai Kung as most of the caregivers are elders over the age of 70. The exhaustion that caregivers feel is amplified by the remote living environment and their own health conditions, they even do not have the time necessary to care for themselves, leaving them depleted and at risk for burnout, anxiety, and depression.

Together with The Hong Kong Council of Social Service and Sai Kung District Community Centre, we are now creating a mobile app for the elderlies in Sai Kung District, to match the caregivers with trained volunteers, and assist the caregivers to provide general household affairs in order to relieve their caring burden.

Sai Kung District Community Centre (SKDCC) was established in the year of 1970. The organisation is continuously promoting livelihood support and establishing a support network in rural area. With the service mission of “connection and mobilizing community resources to love and care our folks and nature across Sai Kung”, SKDCC established a unique rural service to reduce the uneven distribution of resources between urban and rural areas, so that rural life can be preserved and a win-win society can be created.

Project Process

Intending to discover the needs and pain-points of the stakeholders including: the Caregivers, Elderlies, Volunteers and SKDCC staffs, JCDISI organised several user-engagement workshops.

Explore the Visual Literacy of the Elderly

As to make our app more accessible and user friendly for the users, we have run a workshop for the elderly so as to identify and understand their visual literacy. We have prepared a set of commonly used icons and asked the participants to match the icon with the function or service.  We believed that a clear and simple user interface can help guiding the users to use our app smoothly.

As we have observed that, caregivers and elderlies are not very much visually literate with the user interfaces. They could not connect most of the icons with their respective services apart from a few that they might be more familiar with, for example, they got confused by the logo of “photo” (  ). Therefore, we may consider associating function and service names with icons to help out demographic navigate an app.

Service and Function Priority Ranking

Since the app’s launch will feature a couple of primary services that aim to help both caregivers and elderlies with their everyday routines and task. We have created a tier list for them to rank services categories by importance. It could help understanding what may be lacking in their current routines by understanding their service priority ranking.

User Journeys of SKDCC Staff & Volunteers

To understand and apprehend the SKDCC staff’s experience and challenges when carrying out daily tasks to help connecting with different stakeholders. We asked the participants to list their challenges when they carrying the services out, and consolidate their challenges by a group discussion. We hope that the app could lessen the workload for the SKDCC staff and help improving various factions of the centre’s operation.

Prototyping

After several workshops, the design consultant of our project team - Studio Doozy built a prototype for the mobile app. And we have invited a total of 12 elderlies to conduct a user testing. By observing the user's operation process, the team gained new insights and collected a lot of feedback and suggestions from actual users.

Matching App Launched

After a series of workshops collecting feedback from users, including the elderly, carers, center staff, and volunteers, a simple and user-friendly app, developed by our technical consultant Yakoo, has been launched! We prioritise simplifying the user flow of the platform for carers, requiring only the minimum steps to match a suitable volunteer. Considering that elderly prefer direct communication with volunteers, we have incorporated a button with a phone icon that allows them to instantly contact the designated volunteer when applying for services.

The app also fosters communication between volunteers and staff, reducing staff workload and enabling them to organise high-quality training for volunteers. Additionally, it introduces a range of community resources to the elderly and carers, promotes the center's services to a wider audience, and fosters increased volunteer engagement.