Older adults often have difficulty using technology today because these devices aren’t always intuitive to them. We discovered that older adults often develop the “can’t teach an old dog new tricks” mentality, effectively preventing them from accepting new technology into their lives and using it to communicate with their families and friends. Interfaces in new technology just are not intuitive to older adults who grew up without touch-screen devices; when trying to learn how to use devices, they often end up memorizing the locations of buttons on the screens rather than learning to recognize patterns in the locations of the buttons - for example, “Back” buttons are often in the top-left corner of screens, but this doesn’t always make sense to older adults.
Our Audience
The people affected by the technological difficulties that older adults face include not only the older adults themselves, but also their families and friends. Although we will design with older adults in mind, we may also need to use their families and friends as resources to learn what they think would best help the older adults in their lives communicate. For example, how can we design for older adults in their families that have specialized disabilities, like dyslexia or glaucoma? What would help them the best?
What is Trunk?
We interviewed numerous older adults to identify their needs and values. From these interviews, we found that older adults have a need to communicate with their families and feel connected. Oftentimes family members share photos online, but they are never seen by their older relatives. We rarely spend the time to send pictures directly to our family, yet we snapchat and post pictures to Facebook daily. Our app aims to solve this problem. By incorporating the ease of sharing of Snapchat with an interface simple enough for older adults, it will make staying connected with older family members easy.
Trunk is an app that lets families share old and new photos. It encourages families to have conversations about these pictures through video calls and text messages. We often would like to talk more to our family, but don’t know what to talk about. Trunk helps provide new topics of conversation daily. By using photos as the centerpiece of a conversation the app lets us get a better view of our loved ones lives.
Sometimes these pictures and conversations make us more curious about our family members. The app lets loved ones ask each other questions and share the responses with their tree. Trunk is the treasure chest that holds all these valuable memories and cherished stories.
