Analysis on the Transition
Into Assisted Living
Project Summary
I, along with 3 other designers, researched, analyzed, designed, and employed visualization techniques to illustrate and simplify the complex service system centered around the transition into assisted living facilities.
Our investigation resulted in a proposed solution focusing on the introduction of a concierge service, coupled with a community day event, to help the elderly and their family, or other caregivers, ease the transition into an assisted living facility.
Team: 4 Designers
Time: 10 Weeks
My Role: Service Designer/Researcher
We investigated this service system through customer journey mapping, ecosystem mapping, storyboarding, and a service blueprint workshop.
Tools Used: Figma, Miro, Google Suite, InDesign, Pen & Paper
Initial Research
We started with secondary research to gain an understanding of what potential assisted living facility residents are thinking and experiencing.
The two main points that stood out to us are: there are more elderly Americans than ever before and aging Americans want to grow old at home.
Next, we researched existing elderly care methods and uncovered potential project stakeholders through the creation of a preliminary stakeholder map.
This aided in gaining a clearer understanding of the project's goals and requirements while ensuring that subsequent project designs would meet the expectations of key stakeholders.
Journey Mapping
We identified the potential resident and their child/family member as the key co-actors and created an initial journey map that helped us identify two moments of truth.
Click on image for full view
The Zero Moment of Truth occurs during the realization that extra care is needed, and the First Moment of Truth occurs when it comes time to decide where to go for that extra care.
We then finalized our Customer Journey map, including both key co-actors and their emotional states throughout their journeys which helped us determine the segments of the journey that were most ripe for improvement.
Click on image for full view
Ecosystem Mapping
We wanted to find who or what was available to improve this scenario without overburdening the system so we developed and iterated on an ecosystem map that helped us visualize the network of stakeholders supporting this service and the relationships between them.
We started with a radial approach, identifying all the main actors and their relationships, and discovered a concentration of actors within the assisted living facility.
Our second pass still felt too complicated to read easily, so we switched to a grid approach which allowed for an improved representation of how the assisted living facility is an ecosystem within itself and how it relates to the larger ecosystem it operates within.
Our second pass focused on improving readability and featured a magnification of the assisted living facility actors.
Our finalized ecosystem map utilized colors to help visually differentiate the separate actors and included indicators for where we could improve the system. From this, we realized that the majority of the stresses on the co-actors existed through the back-and-forth interactions with outside actors.
Click image for full view
We then visualized how we would address those pain points through our future state journey map. This helped us gain alignment and focus on the ideal customer journey experience through the First Moment of Truth.
Click on image for full view
Storyboarding
Focusing on this moment in the journey, we brainstormed the ideal experience and developed two possible solutions: a concierge service and a community outreach event. We ended up merging these ideas into one ideal customer experience and began storyboarding to help share this vision with others.
The second “wow moment” occurs as they are enjoying the community day and the elderly family member, having experienced this community, warms to the idea of moving into an assisted living facility.
Through our storyboarding, we identified two “wow moments”. The first occurred when they arrived at the community day and the family member/caregiver felt supported and put at ease by the attentiveness of the visit concierge.
Service Blueprinting
We utilized our storyboard to help set the stage as we conducted our service blueprinting workshop. In this workshop we had classmates pose as stakeholders, each bringing different perspectives in to help us build out our service blueprint.
With all this information, we created our Service Blueprint using our storyboard as the scope for the experience to help translate our proposed solution to stakeholders and decision-makers.
Click image for full view
Looking Ahead
Based on our research, we would recommend a few different ideas to help push these services to the next level. Some suggestions include bringing in specialists to teach activities like yoga, arts and crafts, and cooking, or pushing community engagement through activities like book clubs, bingo nights, and card game tournaments.
Additionally, assisted living facilities could partner with local contractors and service providers to develop workshops and help seniors prepare for aging at home. They could also provide hybrid assistance and at-home programs, create a virtual tour of the facility and add it to the facility’s website, and take care of therapy and medication needs to reduce the burden on family/caregivers.