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MS Family Safety (Microsoft BIG Project Winner)

Description

How can I take care of my grandma, while am at work?

The Problem

Aging makes the older adults more vulnerable to health complications. Existing health-monitoring platforms overlook the importance of community alerts via third-party integration. This is often the cause of avoidable deaths and health emergencies.

The Solution: A Care Circle

A dedicated care circle of physicians, family members, friends, and neighbors is always available at the care-seeker’s disposal.

Project Mentors

Jenny Ye

Program Manager 2 at Microsoft,

Word Web

David Tschida

Software Engineer II at Microsoft,

Outlook

Project Type: Academic with Industry; Timeline: August 2021 - December 2021

Team Members: Product Managers and UX Designers (4)

My Key Responsibilities: Ideation, Storyboarding, Qualitative User Research: Primary Research (Stakeholder Interviews, Heuristic Evaluation), Secondary Research (Literature Review), Feature Prioritization, UX Roadmap, Data Synthesis, Field Study, Discovery, Information Architecture, Wireframing, Prototyping, Visual Design, User Testing

Project Brief from Microsoft PMs

“Enhance any one of Microsoft’s existing products according to its established goals, values, and mission to meet the needs of an underserved user group.”

The underserved community we chose

Older Adults aged 50 years or older.

Why Microsoft Family Safety?

In its existing form, Microsoft Family Safety is primarily a parental control and drive safety app, which is centered around a parent-child bond. The missing element of this family dynamic is the adult child-older parent relationship. Our reiteration of this platform focuses on building a unique community of caregivers and care-seekers to cater the health and safety needs of the Older Adults.

The Process

Research and Discovery

Background

The Microsoft Family Safety app helps families build healthy habits and protect their loved ones with their digital and physical safety through activity reports, screen time limits, content filters, family location tracker, and driving reports.

User Research

Primary Research	Secondary Research
8 Stakeholder interviews (Qualitative)	12 Literature Review References
66 Online Survey Participants (Quantitative)	4 Competitor Analysis

Some highlights from Primary Research:

Translating pain points to design opportunities

Research Findings	Older adults feel vulnerable to health complications and need support of nurturers.	Delay in emergency response times are a major cause of avoidable deaths.	Inefficient synchronization of alerts between third-party devices lead to unrecognized abnormalities.
Opportunity Space	How might we form a care circle ie. a community of care-seekers and caregivers?	How might we make the response time quicker during critical medical emergencies?	How might we leverage an ecosystem of interconnected devices and healthcare systems?

Design Opportunity #1

How might we form a care circle: community of caregiver and care-seekers?

Meet our archetypes, John and Kara

Care-seeker John	Caregiver Kara
John is a 60-year old retired man. He lost his wife a few years ago, and Kara is his closest family member who can take care of his health.	Kara is John’s only daughter. She is a working professional and a mother of 2 kids. She is concerned about John’s health as he has been experiencing a lot of health complications recently.

Envisioning a scenario

Types of Caregiver Roles

A dedicated care circle of physicians, family members, friends, and neighbors are always available at the care-seeker’s disposal.

Ideation

Emergency Actions	Live Location and Directions
Ability to check which caregiver is in closest proximity to the care-seeker and contact them.	Ability to track care-seeker’s real-time location and get directions in cases of medical emergencies.

Paper Prototyping

Usability Testing

We created various user flows in Figma and conducted a usability test with older adults to gain initial impressions, insights, and feedback.

Incorporating Feedback from Microsoft PMs

Market Size

https://www.statista.com/statistics/457822/share-of-old-age-population-in-the-total-us-population/

In 2019, about 16.5% of the American population were 65 years old or over. This figure will reach 74.1 million people or 22% by 2050. The adoption rate for wearable tech among these older adults increased from 7% to 17% in 2019.

Competitor Analysis

Prototype

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Emergency Actions and Location Tracking: During emergency situations, the app alerts the care circle and gives caregivers the ability to track the care-seeker, check other caregivers in nearest proximity, and contact them.

Design Opportunity #2

How might we make the response time of medical emergencies quicker?

North Star

Our aim is to make the emergencies faced by a caregiver quantifiable on the app, and help reduce them in the long term. We will calculate total number of emergencies faced by the app users by computing:

The number of times a user manually presses SOS
The number of times automatic SOS is sent to other users and hospitals

Ideation

IoT-surveilled Emergencies	SOS and Rescue Services
The ability to detect non-medical emergencies through smart home devices.	The ability to manually/automatically alert the care circle or emergency rescue services.

Paper Prototyping

User Feedback Insights

Prototypes

Automatic SOS

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The app syncs with smart home devices to detect any adverse situations like Fire and water overflow at home. A SOS alert is sent automatically to corresponding authorities and caregivers.

Manual SOS

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The app gives care-seeker’s the ability to manually alert caregivers or contact 911 in cases of intrusion or multiple wrong attempts to door lock.

Design Opportunity #3

How can we leverage an ecosystem of interconnected devices and healthcare systems?

Ideation

Integrated Ecosystem	Record Alerts
Leveraging integration of third-party health monitoring devices to sync vital metrics.	The ability to alert caregivers about abnormalities in heath records and test results.

Paper Prototyping

User Feedback Insights

We did Guerrilla Usability testing with potential users: care-seekers an d care-givers

Incorporating feedback from Microsoft PMs

Addressing Privacy Compliances

Our team is dedicated to abiding by the Privacy Checklists for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to incorporate necessary compliances.

In addition, our team plans to follow industry standards by implementing the following best privacy practices:

Two-factor authentication
Biometric login using FaceID, Touch ID or other equivalent technologies.
Passcode/PIN app lock (overridden during emergencies by default, opt-out option).
Ability to revoke caregiver’s access to location and all heath data at any time.
No data stored on cloud by default (with the ability to opt-out if subscribed).
No data shared with app developers to improve the product (with the ability to opt-in).
Ability to erase all data from app and third-party devices.
Ability to auto-revoke access to third-party devices if privacy guidelines are violated.

Prototypes

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Health Metrics and Records: The users have access to health metrics, health records, and test results from various health organizations. In cases of abnormal readings and health conditions, the caregivers are alerted, provided care-seekers have given them prior permission.

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Data Sharing Controls and Privacy: The care-seekers can revoke caregiver access to location and health data from the map itself

Evaluation and Planning

1. Heuristic Evaluation

We evaluated the usability of our prototypes based on Jakob Nielsen's 10 Usability Heuristics

2. Feature Prioritization

We used the MoSCoW framework to prioritize our product backlog

Final Prototypes

Caregiver User Flows

Care-seeker User Flows

Future scope

Paper Prototyping

Prototypes

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Medication Tracking: Caregivers can track care-seeker’s medication schedule and remind them about missed medications.

Final Feedback from Microsoft Stakeholders

Team Rebels won the project! 🥳

The more we learned to look at the world from a Product Manager’s perspective, the more we loved working as a team. Lastly, we also ideated the future scope of our concept.

My Reflections

Throughout this project, we referred to the readings of one of the top-rated Product Management books named ‘INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love’ by Marty Cagan. Based on our learnings, we wrote reflective writing that captured our concept development phases through the eyes of a Product Manager.

REFLECTION #1 REFECTION #2