DEMENTIA SOCIETY OF OTTAWA

Focusing on accessibility & inclusion to design a dementia-friendly resources website

“The Dementia Society of Ottawa provides support, coaching, education and activities for everyone impacted by dementia.. ”

Summary

Finding local resources for individuals living with dementia, and the caregivers who support them, is an immense challenge. The Dementia Society of Ottawa needed to find a better solution that would allow caregivers and people living with dementia (PLWD) to search for resources available in their area and know these resources can be trusted.

The Dementia613 project focused on creating a website that would curate dementia-friendly resources for both patients and caregivers. An important part of the strategic approach was to design for accessibility and inclusion.

Leading with user research and accessible design, I created a design approach that made it easier to connect caregivers and dementia patients to timely resources

Client
Dementia Society of Ottawa

Methodology
UX Design and Evaluative Research

My Role
UX Designer, User Researcher, Information Architect

Activities
User Interviews, User Stories, Usability Testing, Taxonomy Design, Wireframes, UX Design

Questions that kept us up at night

  • What are the special needs of people living with dementia and caregivers specific to a digital product

  • What are the barriers of use for both audiences?

  • How might we create a simple, understandable taxonomy culled from over 200 identified dementia friendly resources

  • Dementia Society of Ottawa’s current website and brand colors are, in some cases, not accessible. How can we maintain the integrity of the brand colors, yet evolve them for accessibility

Research Methodologies:

Digging into a myriad of unique user needs and different contexts of use

Untangling a mess of data from a spreadsheet

It was important to map out what was effectively the heart of this project: creating a taxonomy of resource categories based on over 200 identified dementia-friendly resources contained in a spreadsheet.

I borrowed the UX research tactics of affinity mapping and theme clustering resource names and descriptions. This allowed me to speed up arriving at a taxonomy that I could get in front of users to test

Wireframes & Usability Testing

I conducted 1-on-1 moderated usability testing on the wireframes, with a focus on the category taxonomy. Participants included a balanced mix of:

  • Caregivers of diverse ethnicity and age

  • Patients with early onset dementia symptoms

After establishing the full sitemap, including the resource category taxonomy, I set about creating supporting lo-fidelity wireframes that i could user test

Designing for Accessibility & Inclusion

The usability testing yielded huge design iteration insights and considerations including:

  • Using larger button and font sizes, especially body copy

  • Using an economy of text in the UI category topic cards to reduce cognitive load

  • Making sure the user interface presented information in a methodical, understandable pattern

  • Making sure that information hierarchy on a given page was optimized for proper information foraging

Designing for Empathy

One of the biggest takeaways we learned in discovery was how important the concept of “familiarity” was for people living with dementia. I wanted to balance familiar imagery with a warm and inviting color scheme. For the latter, I needed to evolve Dementia Society’s brand colors considerably in order to establish a AAA WCAG standard for color contrast and typography.

Business Outcomes

Although the team loved the strategy, design and overall concept of what was delivered, the project languished for several months. Eventually a more stripped down version of the site was launched before the decision was made to integrate the dementia-friendly resources into the corporate site.

One really positive takeaway was the client was particularly impressed and happy to see how the brand colours evolved to meet accessibility standards.

Let’s work together

I would love to discuss more details about this project; feel free to get in touch to schedule a call or meeting. Email me at: dotsandloopsdigital@gmail.com or send me a message using the form.