Nour | Devpost

Inspiration

After researching problems in elder homes, we learned that the pandemic drastically exacerbated a commonly known problem: loneliness among elderly people. Given that we (as students) felt bursts of loneliness throughout the ongoing pandemic, we could only imagine the amount of loneliness that elderly people felt with their inability to use technology. To make matters worse, many elder homes shut down all forms of activities during COVID-19, leaving elder people with extreme feelings of isolation and depression.

What it does

Our goal was to create a solution that makes elderly people feel less lonely. We built a mobile video call platform that brings the elder together over topics they naturally enjoy chatting about — Current events, food, comedy, fitness.

How we built it

Designed and prototyped in Figma.

Challenges we ran into

Throughout the design sprint, we wanted to focus on accessibility in everything we did. Building an app for people who are naturally unfamiliar with technology proved more difficult than we expected. We realized that it is quite hard to make a well-designed yet accessible app for elderly people. Another challenge we ran into was the display preferences in the onboarding flow. We wanted to create as little friction as possible, but we also wanted to prioritize accessibility over worrying about friction during the onboarding process. As such, we decided to split our one screen on display preferences into three different screens. The final problem we ran into was time. It was difficult for us to address everything we wanted, from edge cases to future plans.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that we were able to create a well thought out solution to a ubiquitous problem in elderly homes. Specifically, we were able to design 16 frames of our app and prototype it. We're also proud that we were able to build a unique narrative as to why we believe our solution is a good one.

What we learned

We learned the importance of designing for accessibility. Through our research, we learned about the many different things that go into accessibility, from color to font size. We also learned how to narrow in on a specific problem and solve a small portion of it.

What's next for Nour

Nour is something that we will continue to think about in the coming weeks. Given that we only had ~24 hours to design it, we will spend more time iterating and thinking about GTM strategy.