Summary
We’re excited to share with you that we’ve been working on the project of our dreams this Spring and Summer. Ageable have been collaborating with the charity Open Age who are an incredible London-based organisation dedicated to supporting older adults. Open Age provides opportunities for members to take part in meaningful activities, strengthen their sense of community, rediscover old hobbies, find new ones, make new friends, and most of all — have fun.
Our role in this Innovate UK funded project was to work with Open Age to create and deliver a human-centred, design-led process in the development of a new set of digital services and online offerings for older adults. Inspired by the impactful online activity sessions they provided during lockdown, the charity wanted to create a sellable offer that would give them the momentum they need to scale beyond the traditional boundaries charities often face — when they typically only deliver and support people ‘on-the-ground’ or in geographical proximity to them.
Why?
During the pandemic, Open Age saw the positive impact their online activities brought to the people they serve. Their ambition was for more people to access their services by scaling digitally. By doing this, they could combat loneliness and isolation more widely, and improve the health and wellbeing of older adults across the country.
Who?
Team Ageable — our director Alice Osborne led the design practice along with Service Designer Holly May Mahoney, Burcu Turkay as an advisor and extra design support from Kerry Leslie. We created a super team for the human-centred design approach.
We were supported by a wider team of developers from Veda, the fabulous Rob Fotheringham from Fotheringham Associates, and Finn Egan & Iain Cassidy from Open Age.
Our main purpose was to ensure that older adults were at the heart of everything we were doing. We were also lucky to experience working with the folks at Imperial College Healthcare Partners (ICHP) Lucie Wellington and Joana Flores who were leading on the evaluation side of this work — to ensure we were collating the appropriate evidence to show the impact of our work.
Process
We used the Design Thinking double diamond approach to pull the work together:
- Discovery — Deep design research into the lives of the older adults using Open Age services, the services offered currently by Open Age, as well as the organisations who could be buying Open Age services in the future, such as Housing Associations.
- Define — Consolidating our research into a set of Personas, Journey Maps, User Needs Statements and an Insights Report highlighting the key lessons, opportunities and themes that came out of our research.
- Develop — Co-designing with older adults and Open Age staff, we created a Future Service Blueprint that detailed the future user journey and the user requirements (both front and back stage) for the new platform. We worked with Fotheringham Associates to translate all the various user needs into product features, environment features and operational features that will guide the development of Open Age Online. We developed a Service Proposition, Stakeholder and Ecosystem maps and guidance for the look and feel of the future product.
- Deliver — The final deliverable for our work was a Service Design report and brief, which included all the above work and our recommendations for next steps. This document acts as a way of weaving together the problem, idea and opportunities for next steps as Open Age scale. Its aim is to be a compass in their organisation as we handed over to the developers to create the first Minimum Viable Product (MVP)*. Prioritisation of the product, environment and operational features were made with older adults at the heart of every decision.
The next phase of the work is being undertaken — the developers are leading the development and delivery process of the MVP* which we will be testing and evolving with our older adults, Open Age staff and potential future buyers in the near future.
It’s been a real honour to do this important work with Open Age, working together to implement considered design thinking and processes, with a user-centred approach that puts older people first. Seeing the difference that the charity makes to people’s lives has been amazing and hugely rewarding. Nothing makes Ageable happier than seeing older adults seen as equals in a process and it’s absolutely happening here. We hope our work supports Open Age to continue putting people at the centre of their work.
We are currently scoping new projects to kick off early in the new year. If you’d like to speak to us, drop Alice an email, as we’d love to explore collaborations with you, or discuss a funding bid together.
*A ‘Minimum Viable Product’ (MVP) is a version of a product with just enough features to be usable by early customers who can then provide feedback for future product development.