Doumi envisions a future where caregivers caring for patients find support in a judge-free community and expert guidance on how to redirect agitated patients.
Product Manager: Sophia
Design: Allison Sennott
Full Stack Developer: Christian Gouldy
Full Stack Developer: Klhee Jacobs
How many of us, maybe a loved one or ourselves, have become intricately involved in caring for someone with dementia? According to Susan Golden at Stanford GSB, the figure stands at a significant 26% of Americans, a number that has steadily increased since 2015 [1]. Moreover, delve into your circle and consider this - about 85% of dementia patients rely on the unwavering support of unpaid family caregivers [2]. Now, with the 65+ population in the United States expected to surge to 94.7M by 2050, the market for family caregivers will grow significantly as well.
Doumi's Vision
Initially we were envisioning an app focused on medication management and calendars for dementia caregivers based on our personal experience.
We, however, made a pivot after our user research and competitive analysis confirmed an unmet need for a comprehensive solution that directly addresses the dual challenges of social isolation and the redirection of agitated patients.
Doumi is uniquely positioned to bridge this gap in dementia caregiving, and this realization led to our vision: empower family caregivers of dementia patients in navigating and sharing their caregiving journey with an open, supportive, and resourceful community.
Since our target population is caregivers over the age of 45, there were several specific design considerations.
I used Valdana as it has clear differentiation between capital and lowercase letters, as well as numbers. When compared to other fonts at the same size, it appeared the most readable. Since Valdana only has two modes - bold and regular - I decided to use Inter as the second font. It has many weights and styles, so it worked well for the headings, labels, and buttons.
I bumped the body text size up to 18px, instead of the standard 16px, so it's easier to see with aging eyes, and all of the headings were scaled up accordingly.
Purple is the color of dementia awareness, and many related organizations (for example, the Alzheimer's Association) use it as their primary palette. In researching the preferred color schemes of seniors, it was apparent that their favorite colors are navy and sky blue. Blue also comes across as trustworthy. Because of this (and the strong visual contrast ratios they provide), we decided to incorporate a palette of blue and purple gradients, with shades of teal and pink accents.
While experimenting with different lo-fi wireframes for the Strategies page, we tested out horizontal carousels. Originally, I thought that they would be a spatially efficient solution. After talking to Sophia about her experiences testing features with seniors, she suggested eliminating the carousels and keeping the interactions as simple as possible. This led to our current design, where the Strategies page has four category cards (with the possibility to add more in the future). The user can easily navigate from there to the specific strategy lists.Another area we tested and refined was the search function. Our users found it confusing, since they expected Google, where you can type and find any keyword.In the Doumi app, users' posts are categorized by preset hashtags. To navigate them, we turned our search bar into a tag filter, with familiar checkboxes.
Iterative Design Learnings
Success with the community feed tasks really depended on whether the user had previous experience using social media. Those that did recognized the familiar flow, and easily went through the steps. Those that didn't struggled to comment and interact.
All of the users found the Strategies section easy to navigate and appealing. They found the information valuable, and wanted to explore this section further.
Doumi realizes its vision by addressing two critical pain points. Firstly, the app establishes a judgement-free support network, utilizing anonymous usernames to encourage open sharing and mitigate the impact of social isolation. Our hypothesis is that the use of anonymous usernames will empower caregivers to freely share their challenges without fear of criticism, with strict community guidelines in place to regulate potential downsides of anonymity.
The community guidelines were born out of a careful evaluation of the potential tradeoffs associated with anonymity. While anonymity can safeguard individuals from judgement and criticism, we acknowledge that it could pose challenges in building accountability within the community. There might be malicious actors who take advantage of anonymity and misuse the platform, and we realized that striking the right balance between anonymity and accountability is crucial. Doumi aims to achieve this by enforcing strict community guidelines and monitoring to regulate the potential downsides of anonymity in order to ensure that the platform remains an open and supportive community for caregivers.
Additionally, the app offers research-based coping strategies tailored to specific symptoms, enabling caregivers to de-escalate aggressive behaviors in dementia patients. Caregivers can experiment with proven tactics, curating a personalized list of strategies based on what works best for their loved ones.
After our ideation session to flesh out features to solve our users' pains, we divided our launch plan in 3 phases to test and learn with an interactive approach. We landed on main features to prioritize for demo day based on its impact, size of the population with the pain, and technical feasibility. Here are the features we are launching for phase 1 (our MVP):
- Community feed
- Make/edit/delete a post
- React or comment on a post
- Access de-escalation strategies
- Bookmark de-escalation strategies
- Search posts based on hashtagsLog in
Technical implementation
Our apps are hosted via ESA. Public Release will be on the Google Play Store.
Our tech stack includes JavaScript (React Native), Expo, and Firebase (backend).
The user would interact with the app to create a user account, create a new post, delete a post, comment on a post, like posts that will be saved in the username's profile, save different strategies. User account is created using Firebase. User account details (e.g displayName, createdTime, email, photoURL, etc) and new posts and comments are stored in Firestore. Firebase auth makes sure the requests to create, receive, delete posts and comments are all authenticated. The data in Firestore are then rendered back on the client-side on the React Native app.
