Avuksesi:
A peer to peer service
for everyday elderly care
Avuskesi service was created with Pia Partanen and winner of Helsinki Start-up Weekend 2016; making every day elderly care more accessible, personal and affordable.
Mapping the sociocultural landscape
With any new idea - timing is crucial. By mapping relevant disruptions, we were able to ascertain what elderly care people were questioning and ready for change. In this case, we were particularly interested in what was happening in Helsinki, Finland although they were not the only ones concerned with area of life. For example, last year the baby boomer generation just reached 70+years of age.
Like many other developing countries newspapers and media are already concerned about the quality of senior resident’s life due to cost and channels to the rest of society resulting in loneliness and increased pressure on their relatives and loved ones. Finland itself is on the verge of reforming their health system 'STOE' in order to address a rapid increase of senior citizens now eligible for support at home. Currently aside from medical care, senior citizens receive 3x 15 minute check-ups per day. Should they wish to extend these hours help costs around €35 per hour. The second part of research we were interested in was mapping the 'actors' within a typical situation of a loved one needing some help with everyday life. Typically, the responsibility of physical and emotional care rests on the children of the elderly; Generation-X. We were also interested in Generation-Y as young adults and potential grandchildren who are looking for a meaningful part time job.
Who: A social problem requires a social approach
After several rounds of iteration and research we developed three key personas that represented our early adopters. These were the heart of our business model which we saw as a sustainable system to provide affordable and personal everyday care that would be much more accessible using a peer to peer model.
“– provide affordable, accessible and personal everyday care using a peer to peer model.”
Developing the service
Basics of How it Works (in english)
Choose your helper
Just tell us what everyday jobs you would like doing and choose from a compatible range of helpers.
Get those jobs done!
For your first visit, we encourage you to discuss house rules and encourage routine so you can get the jobs done exactly how you like it; Gardening, Cleaning, Outdoors, Groceries, Cooking, and Computer help.
Keep a diary, earn a reputation and pay wages easily
At the end of each visit your helper will document their time with you in a digital diary keeping everyone informed. Great helpers also get good reviews! Our service makes it easy to pay wages at the end of each month
Building a Community
Anyone who is familiar with the 'lean' approach to testing ideas know its best to communicate it in the simplest way possible to gauge who the early adopters are likely to be and what resonates with them. Amongst many other touchpoints, we spent a lot of time iterating with landing pages and communicated with our Facebook community. As a designer, this was also an opportunity to test brand identity such as aesthetics and tone etc.
Image: showing the development of landing pages
Image: Key validations into the service
Testing & Validation
Whilst in the process of validating our MVP (the simplest solution) it was important to identify the key features that within our service. This involved lots of wire framing, prototyping, and presenting. We found that higher fidelity illustrations and photographs invoked more trust which was one of our key user experience targets. Throughout this time, we also concierge tested the information for helper profiles with potential employers.
Core features
