YARN: a multimodal storytelling experience for elderly people
YARN helps elderly people document and share their life stories with the people they love, in whatever way feels most comfortable to them. It pairs a physical deck of prompt cards with a companion mobile app, so someone can answer a question by writing, drawing, recording their voice, or talking it through with family.
The name comes from the phrase "spinning a yarn." That storytelling idea also shaped the visual language, which borrows the textures and warm colors of knitting.
The barriers older adults face
Older adults who want to pass their stories down tend to hit several barriers at once. Shaky hands, low vision, and hearing loss can make some tasks slow or tiring. Many haven't had much experience with digital tools. And the right approach varies a lot from one person to the next, so an interaction that works well for one user can stop another cold.
Under all of it is a straightforward need: accessible, meaningful ways to stay close to family. I wanted to build something that met people where they were rather than asking them to adapt to the tool.
Research through empathy tools
I began with secondary research on designing for elderly users, including IDEO's work on senior health design. To get closer to the physical experience, I used IDEO's empathy tools to simulate what these users deal with, restricting my own vision, dexterity, and hearing to feel where ordinary interactions fall apart.
A few things became clear quickly. People felt lost without good onboarding. Different disabilities got in the way of different activities, so drawing and writing weren't equally doable for everyone. Low vision called for high contrast and type that's easy to read. Shaky hands and arthritis limited both how well and how long someone could write or draw. And purely verbal tasks were frustrating for anyone with hearing loss. The pattern underneath all of it was that there's no single accessible interaction for this group. Accessibility had to mean giving people options.
From "life transitions" to a choice-based concept
The project started much broader, built around the idea of "life transitions." Through rounds of discussion with classmates and instructors it kept narrowing, first toward giving elderly people a sense of purpose through storytelling (after a few detours, including one about connecting older adults with younger disabled people), and finally landing on accessible story-sharing between elderly users and their families.
The decision that mattered most came straight out of the research. I dropped the idea of prescriptive prompts, where a card tells you exactly what to do ("draw this," "write about this"), in favor of an open system where you can answer any prompt however suits you best. That one change is what lets the experience work across a wide range of abilities instead of a narrow slice.
A card deck and a companion app
YARN is one system in two halves, built so the familiar physical pieces carry the experience and the app supports them quietly.
The physical half is a deck of prompt cards, each printed with a life-experience question and its own QR code. The deck comes with template sheets for written and drawn answers, plus simple setup instructions for the app.
The app handles the rest. Scanning a card's QR code opens that prompt, and the app can read it aloud for anyone who'd rather listen than read. The flow is short: pick a card, scan it, optionally hear it read out, then choose how to answer. You can write or draw on a template sheet and scan it back in, record a spoken answer in the app, or send a digital invitation for a loved one to talk the prompt through with you. Whatever you make is saved to a shared collection that you and your family can return to later.
Accessibility was built into these decisions from the start. I checked contrast with contrast checkers, scaled up the type and interface elements, kept the UI simple to cut down on mistakes, and supported anything visual with audio. The four ways to answer are an accessibility feature in themselves, since they let people route around whatever happens to be hardest for them.
The visual identity comes from the yarn metaphor: bright, warm colors, a knit-inspired display typeface, and high contrast throughout, with clean layouts and larger-than-usual sizing to keep everything easy to take in.
Narrowing scope and designing for flexibility
The hardest part was narrowing the concept. Getting from something as open as "life transitions" down to one focused product took discipline, and I had to decide whether to design for elderly users or for their family members, a question that only settled on the older adults after some back and forth and outside input.
The other challenge was balancing accessibility needs against an experience that still felt like one coherent thing. The empathy-tools work showed me that different disabilities affect different parts of an interaction, so the design needed to flex. The choice-based response system solved both problems at once: rather than bolting on separate accommodations or forcing one type of interaction, I let every prompt be answered through whatever method worked best for each person.
Deliverables, feedback, and next steps
The final deliverables were PDF mockups of the print materials (cards, templates, and instructions), a Figma prototype of the key app screens and interactions, and a five-minute presentation walking through the whole experience. To be straight about scope: this is a design prototype. The card QR codes link to Figma flows, not to a working technical build.
The feedback I got pointed at the right places to go deeper: a more detailed onboarding experience, a fuller system for storing and accessing the stories, and more thought about how family members actually browse what's been collected. If I kept going with YARN, my priorities would be a full onboarding flow, a dedicated interface for family members, organization and search for the story collections, a technical implementation plan, and, most of all, usability testing with actual elderly participants to check the calls the empathy research could only approximate.
What the project taught me
YARN reminded me that most of the work in design happens before anything looks finished. Research, ideation, and narrowing the concept were where the project lived; the deliverables were just where that thinking became something you could see. The clearest lesson was about inclusive design: it works best when accessibility is part of the concept from the very beginning, and when it's treated as more than a single feature. For this audience that meant designing around choice and flexibility from the first sketch, and letting the physical and digital pieces each do what they're good at. Using the empathy tools changed how I understood the problem, and it's an approach I'll come back to whenever I'm designing for people whose experience is different from mine.