I realised there was a unique scale to this project. With the direction I’m going in, the product I’m designing will basically be intervening and assisting during everyday life. In other projects, I would be designing for a specific usage, but the breadth of this project presented a problem.
From my user interviews, I had a good idea of what the day-to-day life of someone with dementia looked like, so I wanted to identify all the risks and things that could happen during the day around a house. To do this, I am going to map out a house and identify all the risks from room to room that could occur due to memory and physical issues. This would also help me to create my user journey maps as it builds up a more linear picture of how my product would operate in day-to-day life.
The first step of this part was to create a layout diagram for a house. This would allow to map out danger points and trace daily routines.
Next, I went through and identified every object in the house, followed by the risks each object could present. I used a code for this and grouped objects into the same things (ie, sofas). This was useful as it allowed me to identify everything within a house that would need to be considered for the project.
For the final step of this part, I mapped out the travel around a house someone with dementia would do on a standard day based on research such as the user interviews and desk research. I split this into morning, noon, and night to make it more manageable and each point is where the person would possibly come into contact with a risk. This was important for me to establish now as a “normal” day due to the direction the project was taking. It was looking like the smart home system would just be integrated into normal life, which makes for such a vast array of things that could happen. Establishing this path now would allow me to use it as the users journey throughout the project, so it would serve as the steps for a user journey map, user flows, and possibly prototypes or demo videos.
With the “normal day” established, I could now move on to user journey mapping.