About the Project

This is an app that was developed during the pandemic to help bring church services to convalescent homes.

Timeline

Tools

1 month

Pen & Paper, Figma

My Role

Product Designer, working in a team

Elderly
Care
Ministry

We wanted to bring church to the people who wanted it, even if we couldn't be there in person.

Project Overview

My church has a ministry called "Elderly Care Ministry," where we go to convalescent homes and put on a church service for the residents there. The elderly are one of the most forgotten groups of people, and studies show that many of the residents of these homes never get a single visitor—as a result, many of them feel forgotten, lonely, and depressed.

Normally, our church members would go to our local homes to visit these elderly and remind them that they aren't forgotten and that they are loved. However, when the pandemic hit, convalescent homes closed their doors to outside visitors, and we had no way of ministering to them or contacting them.

This project was born to bring a solution to this issue. Since we couldn't physically go and put on a church service, we would bring it to them virtually.

Intro

Since this app was developed during covid times, it was difficult to actually do user research, even though our users were physically close to us. Instead, I had to think back on my previous visitations and remember the different kind of people with whom I interacted with and think of what they would need and want.

I knew that many residents had smartphones and knew how to use them. And for those who didn't, I thought that perhaps the attending nurses would be able to give them access to the application, as they kept phones and tablets with them to help residents connect with their relatives through Zoom when the pandemic hit.

Brainstorming

Since the goal of this project was to bring as much of our regular Sunday program to these residents, I started by thinking about what we usually did with these residents.

Our schedule was something like this:

Entering the room & setting up
Greetings
Opening hymn
Opening prayer
Message
Ending hymn
Hang out + prayer with residents

Users:

Generally, my users would most likely be older adults. Other users may include their caretakers or younger residents. But because the vast majority were elders, I decided to design with them specifically in mind. As a result, I chose to be mindful about these things:

having a large enough font size, sans serif
design simplicity
ease of navigation
sticking with familiar patterns

While it had already been decided that we for sure were going to add some kind of virtual video message, I thought it would be nice to have hymns and guided prayers, because I noticed many of the residents really enjoyed those aspects of our services. For many of them, even if their memory was growing weak, they could still very clearly remember hymns they had sang when they were younger.

I also thought it would be good to design a way to keep in touch with the residents and give them assurance that they were being prayed for. We used to have conversations and pray over any burdens these residents had after service, and I wanted to imitate something like that in the app and connect with them.

Finally, our team discussed having resources for caretakers and nurses at the homes on how to use our app.

Product Features:

Following our brainstorm, we decided to have our app include the following features:

Bible Messages
Hymns
Guided Prayer
Contact Us/Prayer Request
Resources for Staff

With these features determined, I started designing.

Design Process

The process for this project felt a little different from other projects, since we from the get go knew who our users were. Instead of a more typically linear process, it felt like we were thinking about the persona, strategy, problem simultaneously as we tried to come up with a solution.

Final Thoughts

I really loved being a part of this project. While this product is designed to help residents of convalescent homes have a church experience during covid lockdown, the end product is ultimately that anyone can use.

Although the app features itself cannot really mimic a full-fledged church service or the community that comes with in-person church, it provides elements of it. Some of these convalescent homes we used to visit were hit with covid outbreaks and it was understandable for us that we could not and should not visit them in person. Still, with this app, we hoped that it could be a source of strength and encouragement for our residents as they faced the lonely and hard experience of being in isolation.

I think something that was interesting and unexpected about this process was the aspect of working with engineers. I realized that I can design something, but can be a lot more challenging to implement it into the actual product. This is one of the few times this kind of constraint had been placed on me, and I thought it was a great experience because it showed me what designing in "real life" is like. There are a lot more limitations and priorities set, a lot more iteration needed, and I thought it was a great learning experience.

Hi-Fidelity Mockups

The designs went through several rounds of iteration as I got different feedback from the team after testing the mockups with them.

Ultimately, the final designs are modeled after Apple's iOS because I thought it would be good to model the clean interface, and it would only help my residents that the interface and navigation was something they would have seen before.

Wireframes:

I created multiple different sets of wireframes to determine the structure and layout of the final product.

One of the things I was debating between was having a home page vs. a bottom navigation bar, and ultimately the bottom navigation bar won out because I thought it would be easier for my users to track where they were in the app.