This has been a collaborative effort by my team “Happiness Over Age” for our Spring 2021 semester project for Fundamentals of Engineering Design Innovation. We are developing an app which we are calling “Quilt”. It is designed to be an easy to use, mobile and tablet friendly app for elderly individuals and their families, friends, care teams. We recognized that new technology can often be difficult to learn and frustrating for individuals less familiar with software applications and smart devices. Our team saw an opportunity to make something accessible for all ages and skills levels, while taking advantage of the benefits that a clean, simply designed application can provide. We want Quilt to act as a “one stop shop” for features like medicine and appointment reminders, call and video chat, emergency alerts, care team record taking and meal orders.
As a team we identified user groups and created personas to determine basic user needs. We started by considering font, color, and sound design for elderly individuals who may have developed difficultly seeing or hearing.
After some story-boarding and feature additions and deletions our concept started to gain clarity.
Below are some wireframe prototype sketches by team member Audrey Digiglio.
I have been creating color palettes and finding button and page design inspiration from familiar rural American and Pennsylvania Dutch imagery such as classic quilt design and barn quilts, also known as hex signs. I think the vivid, bold colors and designs lend themselves to being easy to see and provide a homey, familiar feel to users. I am currently in the process of pulling all of these design elements in to one clean Adobe Xd prototype.
Below are some images I’m using for inspiration.
