Creating a digital platform for the aging population in Pittsburgh
Revel Pittsburgh asked us to re-imagine their idea of a community network involving senior centers, the seniors themselves, and Revel's sponsors.
Our team researched and designed a complete re-imagining of what Revel should be to address the communities needs.
Whereas Revel Pittsburgh used to be a portal for information, it is now a place which allows people to find activities, classes, and volunteer opportunities, as well as hosting their own events for people to attend - creating a network of active lifestyle for the baby boomer population in Pittsburgh.
Revel received funding based off of our re-imagining of its original vision.
The first steps in coming up with an effective design solution for Revel Pittsburgh was to find out what the target demographic wanted.
In our pursuit of this, our team conducted interviews in senior centers across Pittsburgh as well as over the phone.
Additionally, we conducted a thorough literature review of the topic and a competitive analysis of other networks in the aging space.
The primary goal of our research was to find the pain points of the boomer generation.
What were they frustrated with? Where did they see an opportunity to improve their lives?
In an effort to sift our way through the results of our field research we employed various modeling methods, primarily affinity diagramming.
Using these techniques we came away with three key research findings to inform the design and purpose of the new Revel Pittsburgh. Revel would now be an activity hosting network with content generated both by the Boomers themselves and the Senior Centers.
Our team used iterative design methods to create Revel Pittsburgh. We began with paper prototypes, which we got feedback on with our target demographic in preparation for our next iteration of the design.
This prototyping method allowed us to quickly go back and forth between our user population to make sure that we were organizing information in ways that made sense to seniors.
Our team moved to medium fidelity prototype testing after we had gathered enough feedback from previous prototype testing to create an information architecture that made sense to our users.
Our goal was speedy iterations, so we used tools like Mockups to quickly generate an interactive prototype and bring it back out in the field for some hands-on user testing.
The final stage of our iterative design process was creating the high fidelity prototype of Revel Pittsburgh, which underwent several user testing phases before finally reaching its current look and feel.
Our observations of boomers interacting with our final prototype validated our design solution, and Boomers who engage with the full Revel product report having positive experiences and an intuitive navigation of the site.
On the back of this work, Revel was able to secure its series A funding, and continues to provide services to the aging population in Pittsburgh.