VR Game Room for NTUC Nursing Home
Domain
Eldercare; Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality; Game Design
Duration:
Feb 2020 – April 2020
Team:
In collaboration with Mind Palace, for client - NTUC Health Nursing Home
Role:
Interaction Designer. Information architecture; User Experience Flow; UI creative direction - Setting the look and feel of the experience
Brief: An interactive experience for eldercare
Mind Palace provides an opportunity residents in nursing homes who may be immobile to experience the world in VR; keeping their minds active and slowing the effects of dementia. They were approached by an established nursing home in Singapore to build a permanent immersive room experience.
How might we onboard senior citizens and their nursing home caregivers gracefully and tactfully onto an immersive VR game experience?
Design Process
We work in agile sprints, adopting the 4Ds method, Discover - Define - Development - Deployment.
User Flows: Guiding the guide and the guid-ee
As Mind Palace didn’t have a UX designer, I collaborated with them to craft out a cohesive flow and guide the visual direction of the Immersive room. We realised that besides onboarding the elderly folks, we needed to guide their nursing home caregivers (who are also often not nimble with technology) to navigate this new digital experience.
(See image right to see the difference between what the elderly will see on the room walls and what the caregiver will see on the computer screen.)
Wireframing and Roomframing
After a session working closely with the programmer, I realised that the project was not as straightforward as designing screens and that led to many misinterpretations when we communicated. Hence, I developed “roomframes” along with wireframes to visually articulate our concepts and it helped tremendously! (See images below)
Mind Palace Games
Besides designing the UX flow for the Mind Tours, I also helped them to develop the information architecture and wireframes for their newest offering - Mind Palace Games, which involves Heritage Run and Fruit Ninja, allowing them to stay fit and healthy.
For different functions and features of the Immersive Room, I created user flows for each of them. For example, they offer Mind Tours – which take elder folks on trips around the world, and to familiar places to jog their memories. Here is the user flow for the landing scenario when the elderly first enter the room. (See image below)
After several rounds of live testing, we realised that the caregivers need to have more flexibility over the controls such that they can tweak the speed and cadence of the game to fit the physiological levels of the elderly participants. I created the user flow for game settings/main settings and warnings console for the caregiver.
Further testing also prove that not all the caregivers are tech-savvy and that guidance and easy-to-understand instructions needed to be given to them. I proceeded to design a visual onboarding experience for the caregivers.
Early Design Visualisations
The project is currently still on pause due to COVID-19.