Age-Friendly Design
Improving peoples' lives with smart home technologies.
Challenge
How can we help people to identify truly beneficial solutions for their own needs at home?
Summary
The Age Friendly project aimed to define inclusion and usability assessment criteria for technology-based devices for Smart Environments. The research, funded under an Italian public grant and in collaboration with Loughborough University, was developed following a mixed method ethnographic research. The project was unfolded through literature-based research, interviews, focus groups, questionnaires and co-design. The final outcome was composed of a series guidelines to support people to better understand the most suitable device for their home environment according to their specific needs.
Impact
This project, as a result of the Ph.D. dissertation, received an “excellent” evaluation from the international Ph.D. reviewing committee.
It was recognized for its success as a user-informed decision-making process for future development of policies across Europe and received the First prize at the National Italian Award “ETIC” from AICA and Rotary International. You can download and read the open access book that summarizes this research.
My role
As a Ph.D. researcher, I learned about qualitative user-research methods including interviewing, scenarios with dynamic and static verifications, user personas, quantitative methods, such as heuristic evaluation, A/B testing, usability testing, and wireframing and prototyping.
The collaboration with multidisciplinary teams across Italy and the United Kingdom allowed me to further develop organizational, management, presentation, and networking skills.
I was also appointed as coordinator for two research projects I developed during my PhD research residency. A list of published material about this project can be found here: [1], [2], [3], as well as a volume edited in Italian.
