Expanding the Cognitive Aging Research and Education Center’s digital footprint and spreading accessible dementia education throughout Georgia by creating a website, educational video series and a social media strategy
This was a client-based project with a group of graduate student professionals with the New Media Institute at the University of Georgia.
Project Date: July 2023 — May 2024
Team Members: Allison Carter, Alexis Faire, Amelia Neumeister, and Adam Traina
My Roles:
UX Researcher, UX Designer, Developer, Video Editor, Editor
Project Overview
The Cognitive Aging Research and Education (CARE) Center wants to bring Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD) education, support, and diagnosis to all Georgians no matter where they live. That’s why CARE partnered with the NMI to create a custom made website, an original Brain Health Video series, and the foundations of a social media strategy.
Our team used Figma, WordPress with the Elementor Pro Plugin, Premiere Pro and Envato Elements to create these products.
Problem
Within the rural and small communities of the state of Georgia, there are only 100 practicing geriatricians which means information about dementia and brain health can often be misunderstood or difficult to find. Simply put, rural Georgians lack access to healthcare resources that relate to ADRD and this inequity leads to poorer outcomes in regards to their health. The CARE Center wants to change that but, as of right now with no online presence, their reach is only to a handful of Georgia’s rural counties.
Solution
In order to solve the problem, we spent the semester creating a digital footprint for the CARE Center. Our work focused on revamping their website, filming a video series and interviewing members of Georgia’s rural communities to uncover social media insights.
User Testing
Our team’s user experience research and testing journey began in October 2023 when we did preliminary user testing on our Figma prototype’s first iteration of the CARE Center’s website. This initial research informed who we designated as our target audiences.
We identified our target audiences as the following:
- Rural Georgians aged 65 and up who have been diagnosed with dementia
- Those in the 25+ range serving primarily as caretakers
- Those with a family history of dementia
- People curious about ADRD
With our target audience parameters defined, we conducted user testing that included completing a series of tasks and detailed questions about the website’s design and usefulness. The data collected from these initial tests was valuable in that it provided concept validation and initial insights into user’s needs. Two of our key findings in concept validation were that none of the users tested had a go-to source for ADRD education and few visited competitor websites our team found while conducting market research.
With initial testing under our belt, we started building out our website and implemented changes — which will be discussed in the following section — suggested by our initial prototype testing. By mid-December 2023, our website was ready to undergo another round of user testing. However, we had to make a user experience research plan.
Our team’s goal in conducting the second round of user experience testing was to determine if the CARE Center’s website was user-friendly and easy to navigate when trying to find resources relating to ADRD.
The qualitative and quantitative methods used were customized for our target audience who we determined — through previous user research and user persona development — are likely busy, concerned with their or a loved one’s health, looking for guidance and may not be as familiar with using digital resources.
We recruited our target audience from previous users, word-of-mouth, client contacts in rural communities and online networks of people in the state of Georgia. We aimed for our sample to be mostly rural Georgians ranging in age, but leaning towards 40 and up. All that being said, we made note that due to our own geographical constraints and digital nature of the testing methods there was potential that it would skew less rural and younger than desired.
Despite our concern that the users we recruited would be outside our target audience, most fit at least one area of the criteria. All interviews were conducted via Zoom. Participants completed a pre-test survey, pre-test questions, a series of tasks, Microsoft’s Product Reaction Cards and a post-test survey. We also used Microsoft Product Reaction Cards to gauge effectiveness of the video series. We measured the results of the tasks with a Success/Failure rate and the surveys were analyzed using attitudinal metrics. Any issues were categorized using severity ratings. The Product Reaction Card results for both the website and video series were communicated via word clouds.
Our participant’s responses to the pre-test questions resulted in data that supported our desired sample pool.
Participants ranged in age from 22–74, 46.2% had a connection to rural Georgia, and most either served as a caregiver or know someone diagnosed with dementia. After compiling the data, we used insights from analyzing the quantitative and qualitative data to report the Average System Usability Score, positive findings and usability issues. The Average System Usability Score was 92.2 which is 24.2% higher than average according to usability.gov.
Our positive findings for the website included users finding its educational hierarchy and appearance clear and easy to navigate:
“Not too busy. Like the Alzheimer’s Association website, there’s so much you just get kind of lost. This one you do not.”
“…I haven’t spent a whole lot of time on the website. It seems like there are helpful tools from my perspective. My mother had dementia and so having a place where there’s specific support or education and the things that I thought about whenever she was being diagnosed.”
The positive feedback for our video series included users describing it as very professional and helpful:
“We’re more on a caption sort of, world these days. This is sort of a captioned version of some deep science.”
“It gives you some sense of ‘Hey, here are these different types of cognitive decline, but you know, it’s okay. You can call us or see a doctor’.”
Our top usability issues included:
High Severity:
- Services CARE provides outside of education were unclear. “What can they do for me as a caregiver more than what I’m seeing on the website?” Proposed Solution: Add a page dedicated to CARE’s Clinic and their services. Create a link to that page in the navigation bar.
- A portion of our target audience uses their mobile device’s accessibility and zoom features that impact usability. Solution: Install an accessibility plugin so users can decrease text size.
Low Severity:
- Video has a verbal call to action, but no information to show where to go. Solution: Put the CARE Center’s web address in the outro. These insights were used to reinforce our UX design decisions with the client, make recommendations to the client or to improve the user experience through making changes.
Although some of the solutions to the problems weren’t implemented due to the client’s request, we learned valuable information and were able to improve the user’s experience through minor adjustments.
Website
CARE’s plan for its already-existing website, carecenter.uga.edu, was to improve and eventually relaunch to include ADRD support, diagnosis, and education resources. By doing this, CARE had hopes of developing a digital footprint, further explaining their mission and purpose. This website was their opportunity to expand to the rural communities of Georgia.
The CARE Center website was hosted through WordPress as a single landing page. As a team, we agreed it would be best for the organization to continue using the hosting site for easy access and future modifications.
Before we were brought on, the CARE Team had already gone through a branding and basic card sorting exercise. They provided us with a few basic page design concepts and a layout for the website navigation.
Our first order of business as a team was to look for inspiration for the new and improved CARE website.
After researching some of CARE’s “competitors” and each of us finding design inspiration, we developed a prototype, using Figma, to create page layouts for the home, about, locations, and donations pages.
Keeping CARE’s branding for older adults in mind, we included an easy-to-read font, a selective color palette, and an assortment of imagery to create a welcoming experience for users.
During the entire development process, we also attended bi-weekly Zoom meetings with our clients to discuss expectations and to provide updates as we completed phases of the project. They gave us feedback on our prototype (and later the actual website) and provided us with content needed for the website pages.
After gaining access to the CARE Center WordPress, our team had a major decision to make. What was the best way to design the website, exceed the expectations of our clients, and make it easy-to-navigate for the CARE team and the next NMI cohort?
We decided, as a team, the best option was to use a theme or plugin that would allow us to customize certain areas to fit CARE’s brand and to fill in the content they provided in a creative, organized manner. The plugin, Elementor Pro, allowed us to do just that. With elements like a custom footer and navigation bar, we were able to recreate pages similar to what was designed during the prototype stage.
By creating a site map in Figma, we were able to create a website layout and assign each team member the responsibility of designing specific pages. To maintain consistency, each content page and individual sections followed a template that includes elements like a hero banner with a cover image and background overlay, a table of contents, flip cards, and supportive images. The content layout for the individual sections needed to be arranged in a way that followed CARE’s branding guidelines and was easy for users to process the information.
The next phase of our website development included conducting a second round of user experience testing — detailed above. Through this we were able to identify areas of UX design improvement by observing how people actually move through the website and recording test responses. In order to improve the user’s experience, we increased the size of buttons, added the One Click Accessibility Plugin, added the CARE Center’s patient paperwork to the locations page and changed About Us to About. Along those same lines, we continued to refine the CARE Center website based on feedback from our clients.
Over the past nine months the clients’ goals for the purpose of the website evolved, due to this evolution and missing imagery the client did not feel like the homepage reflected their goals. That meant our homepage needed to evolve from featuring representation of what rural Georgians look like to featuring imagery of CARE Center employees. Additionally, the homepage images were turned into flip boxes at the request of the client and have quotes from the person pictured on the back of the image. Another apparent change as a result of client requests and user testing insights, was to move the navigation bar to accommodate the addition of Donate, Locations and Research to the main navigation bar.
With collaboration between our client and team members to get everything exactly right, CARE’s website officially launched in May of 2024. Now, people across the state of Georgia can easily access ADRD resources.
Video Series
The CARE Center has an established in-person Brain Health presentation that educates viewers on how to improve or maintain brain health as it relates to Alzheimer’s Disease and related dementias (ADRD). CARE representatives visited 11 counties in rural Georgia to give these presentations, and that’s great. However, the gap it leaves in ADRD education for the remaining rural areas of Georgia where CARE doesn’t have a presence is wide. That’s why we were tasked with turning that in-person presentation into a video series that would be housed on YouTube and CARE’s website.
When we first started the Capstone Project, we felt that the CARE Center needed to be properly introduced before diving into Brain Health topics. So, we created a rough cut for an introductory video stating common misconceptions about ADRD. The video’s concept was based on the role hearsay often plays in rural communities. For this video, we storyboarded the idea and set out to film the video’s first iteration with the intention to recast with people from the CARE Center. When we previewed the first iteration to CARE Center co-founders, Jenay Beer and Lisa Renzi-Hammond, they were all in on the concept of adding one video that introduces the CARE Center to the Brain Health video series.
With that suggestion approved, we began working on the concept of the Brain Health video series. We looked towards sources like the Mayo Clinic, TED Talks, Emory Healthcare and other well-known medical institutions’ videos to determine the initial look and feel of our series. What we gathered was that we would need a speaker who was engaging, friendly and knowledgeable on the topics to be the presenter. Instead of using a voiceover artist or actor we looked to the CARE Center to provide speakers due to their intimate knowledge of ADRD topics. We knew that featuring CARE experts would also reinforce the credibility of the CARE Center as a source of knowledge.
Before filming, we read through the content of CARE’s in-person Brain Health presentation and decided to divide the series into 7 brain health videos. Our divisions aimed to keep the videos as short-form content. We chose this route because in our user interviews we discovered that viewers preferred shorter videos instead of longer. The video topics are as follows:
- Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementia Beginner
- Non-Modifiable Risk Factors/Modifiable Risk Factors
- Cognitive Novelty
- Sleep & Hygiene
- Stress Management
- Physical Activity and Exercise
- Healthy Diet
Visually, the video series went through some changes. Many of the videos used as inspiration featured motion graphics animations. At first we planned to do the same, however, due to time constraints we ended up pivoting to using documentary style b-roll sourced from Envato Elements. When filming the experts, teammates Amelia and Allison drove to the CARE Center’s main location in Athens, Ga. to record. This involved two visits where we set up a green screen for the CARE experts to stand in front of as they read their individual scripts.
Once the first two videos were filmed, we set about to begin creating a template for the series to follow. Initially, we intended for the series to feature motion graphics animations.
But, we quickly figured out that it would be difficult to maintain a visual theme with the motion graphics selections offered by Envato. Knowing this, we pivoted to using documentary style b-roll.
When constructing the final template for our videos, we relied on CARE’s official branding — specifically the colors — to create a theme that strings together each video with visual elements.
Those visual elements consist of a custom-made intro/outro, lower thirds that introduce each speaker, a bug that is CARE’s logo, an overlay for all b-roll and an animated background to display text, lists or graphs.
Our hopes for the video series is that it can be repurposed and edited down into clips that are used on social channels. We believe this is completely doable because we’ve already done it on the website. In order to give users a little more context about who CARE is and what CARE does, we included a short portion of the introductory video on the website’s homepage.
The last component to setting up the video series was to create a YouTube channel for the CARE Center where the videos would be hosted on a playlist entitled Brain Health Video Series.
Our team spent the last few months of our Capstone Journey editing of the remaining videos in the Brain Health Video Series. We continued our use of Adobe’s Premiere Pro, Envato Elements and CARE’s branding to maintain the consistency from the original videos in the series.
After several rounds of critiques from within our team, NMI experts and the clients themselves, each video was complete. They were then uploaded to the CARE YouTube channel, which included subtitles for accessibility and captions that explained what each video discusses. They were also uploaded to the Brain Health Video Series page that lives on the CARE website.
Communications Plan
At the beginning of this project, we were presented with the task of creating a social media plan. Our clients understood that social media is often the best way to reach people. While the CARE Center has been mentioned on UGA social media channels, they have no real presence of their own. Building social media channels and audiences from scratch can easily become an entire project of its own, so we were tasked with creating just the social media strategy for the CARE Center, with actual deliverables to be created by the next NMI group.
As we worked to create the website and video series, we realized the scope of simply a social media plan wouldn’t be enough to fit the needs of the Care Center. Because of this, we pivoted and created general communication recommendations for the Center, with the hopes that the next team to work on this project will expand on it.
So how did we decide we needed to pivot? Well, we looked at general demographics for social media platforms and we did user interviews. Early in the semester, Amelia and Allison drove out to McDuffie County and attended a CARE and community member listening session. During that time, we interviewed a few members of the community who were involved with the CARE Center. We gained valuable insight from these interviews.
From these interviews we confirmed that CARE’s audience is on Facebook and enjoys watching videos on that platform, but they also enjoy listening to content.. We also validated that the younger members of the communities, those who would often serve as caregivers, prefer Instagram and shorter-form video content.
We decided to recommend the next team focus on patient education via long-form video content on Facebook and Youtube and then use short-form video content on TikTok and Instagram to connect with caregivers and younger audiences.
One additional media channel we recommended was a podcast that tells the story of the CARE Center through highlighting client testimonials, their researchers’ work and prevention content.
We hope our successors utilize the content we created this semester to jumpstart the CARE Center digital communications efforts.
Results
Having the opportunity to be part of this project will always hold a special place in my heart because of the affect ADRD has had on my own family. This process has given me the chance to utilize my talents, learn new practices, collaborate with a team, and make a difference for a community of people.
I’m excited to see the future expansion of the CARE Center organization and their impact in the world of cognitive research.
Final Deliverables
Project Website: https://projects.nmi.cool/2024/em/care/index.html
Final Presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auwYWYQ-4_0
CARE Website: https://carecenter.uga.edu/
Video Series: https://www.youtube.com/@UGACARECenter