Project Overview
The client
Ria is a new elderly-care technology product: a digital companion that helps older adults record and preserve their life stories, stay connected with family, manage reminders and appointments, and communicate their care preferences, while giving families a way to participate in that care without taking over.
The project
Two surfaces designed as one product. A UI/UX design for the Ria mobile application and a marketing website to introduce it to the market. Brand-led, spanning information architecture, UX, a shared design system, and high-fidelity design across both, and carried out in close collaboration with a Ria team that had a clear, well-developed vision for what the product needed to be.
The situation
Ria had no "before". This was a pre-launch product taking an unfamiliar concept to market, and the job of both surfaces was the same at root: convert a complicated, sensitive, easy-to-misunderstand idea into something an older adult, an anxious family member, a care organisation and an investor could each grasp and trust. No small task when those four people arrive wanting entirely different things.
The Brief and the Core Challenge
The Ria team came to the project with a substantial and clearly articulated brief, and a strong idea of what they wanted: an accessible app that lets older adults preserve stories, stay connected and manage care preferences, that lets families coordinate support, alongside a website to explain all of it and generate interest across four audiences. The direction was well formed from the outset, and much of the work was a matter of realising a shared vision rather than reinventing it.
The challenge both teams focused on was one of presentation, not purpose. Ria does a lot: storytelling, transcription, AI conversation, video calls, reminders, wellbeing check-ins, a personal care Portrait, family-network management. Presented flat, that breadth becomes a hazard. The website could read as a feature catalogue, the app as a dense care-management dashboard, and the very audience Ria exists to serve, older adults already wary of new technology, might take one look and leave.
So the shared task wasn't explaining everything Ria does. It was leading with the one thing that makes the rest make sense. The Ria team was clear on this from early on, and the close discovery work confirmed it: Ria’s value isn't any single feature, it's the connection of identity, family and everyday support, and storytelling is the emotionally accessible door into all of it. Lead with the story a person wants to preserve, and the reminders, the check-ins and the care coordination stop looking like surveillance and start looking like care.
Discovery: One Product, Two Opposite Problems
The competitive scan surfaced a clean gap. Storytelling apps did emotion well but stopped at the digital scrapbook. Care-coordination tools did logistics well but felt clinical. Almost nobody held both, and holding both is precisely what Ria is. The whitespace was a companion that preserves who a person is while quietly supporting how they're cared for, which matched the Ria team's own reading of where the product sat.
Mapping the journeys together revealed that the website and the app faced mirror-image challenges, and that understanding is what let the teams design them as one system rather than two separate projects.
- The website's problem was breadth. A broad, unfamiliar proposition that had to feel simple enough to trust. Its job: move a visitor from emotional recognition, to understanding, to trust, to action, without ever front-loading the feature list.
- The app's problem was depth. A genuinely complex system that had to feel simple enough for an anxious 80-year-old to use daily. Its job: make the most meaningful action, telling a story, feel immediate, and let the machinery hide behind it.
One discipline answered both: absorb the complexity into the system, never pass it to the user.
A second insight from the joint discovery work reshaped the whole app. The Admin, usually a family member, wasn't just another account type. They were the thing that made adoption possible. That turned onboarding from a solo registration ordeal into an assisted handover, one of the most consequential decisions in the project, and one that came directly out of working through real care scenarios with the Ria team.
The Strategy
The work was governed by a principle the Ria team held firmly and both teams shared: human before technical. Stories and relationships lead; AI and care technology stay in the background as helpers, never the main attraction. Everything else followed from that. The website was organised by audience need and sequenced from emotional recognition to practical trust. The app was organised by role and frequency of use, so each person saw only what was theirs. And because Ria’s ambition outran any sensible first release, the teams together defined the smallest complete experience that still delivered real value (storytelling, family participation, reminders, basic coordination) and held the rest as later phases, so the launch wasn't buried under its own vision.
Design: The Decisions That Shaped It
The website: recognition before features
Working from the Ria team's content direction, the homepage was structured to refuse to open with what Ria does. It opens with why it matters: the quiet problem of lost stories, of an ageing parent becoming a set of tasks rather than a person. Only once that lands does the site explain the product, and only then does it branch into audience-specific pathways for older adults, families, care partners and investors. Each path runs from the visitor's own worry to the relevant Ria outcome to the supporting feature, in that order. The Personal Portrait, for instance, is introduced through the need for more personal, respectful care, not as a database of health preferences. Calls to action appear only after enough has been understood to make the next step feel earned, tuned to the audience: request a demonstration, join the waitlist, enquire about partnership.
The app: three decisions that define the experience
1. Role-based pathways, not one shared dashboard
The obvious build is a single dashboard that greys out what each role can't access. The team decided against it, because a disabled button an older user can't use is still clutter that makes the interface feel harder. Instead each role gets its own experience. The older user sees a handful of large, persistent actions (Talk to Ria, Record a Story, Call Family, Hear Reminders, Today's Tasks, Get Help). Admins and Network Members get the broader tools their roles need. More architecture to build, a far calmer product to use.
2. Onboarding as an assisted handover, not a solo setup
Asking an anxious, low-confidence older user to create an account, configure permissions and understand AI and privacy settings alone is how you lose them on day one. So the Admin prepares the account, profile and settings in advance, and the user reviews and confirms the decisions that matter with support beside them. Crucially, the design stops short of letting the Admin accept everything on the user's behalf. That would have been faster, but it conflicted with a firm requirement from the Ria team: self-determination and informed consent are core principles of the product, and the user had to remain the one who decides about their own stories and data. The assisted handover keeps the family's help and the user's dignity in the same flow.
3. Story recording as a voice-first, single-purpose act
Recording a memory is the emotional heart of Ria, so it was protected from admin. The user starts by voice or touch, speaks naturally, and stops. Ria handles transcription, naming and categorisation afterwards. The date, image, and privacy choices all come after the story is captured, never before, so nothing interrupts the moment someone is finally moved to talk. The alternative (choose a category, title and privacy setting first) yields tidier data at the exact cost of the thing that matters most: that the story gets told at all.
The thread that ties both together
The visual language had to feel warm and human without tipping into either the clinical or the nostalgic, the two ditches every product in this category falls into. Organic shapes, authentic intergenerational photography, speech-related motifs, warm but confident colour, and typography set large and clear as a matter of strategy rather than compliance. A shared design system carried this across both surfaces, so the warmth a visitor first felt on the website was the same warmth waiting inside the app. Discovery and daily use feel like one continuous relationship, not a marketing promise the product then fails to keep.
What We Learned
For older users, accessibility is confidence, not just contrast
Large text and big touch targets are the easy, visible half. The deeper half is reassurance: making it obvious when Ria is listening, whether an action succeeded, and how a mistake can be undone. Reframing accessibility from a visual checklist into a principle of predictability and control changed more decisions than any font size ever could.
The simplest-looking interaction usually hides the hardest thinking
"Record a story" looks like one button. Underneath sit voice activation, transcription, categorisation, privacy, family responses, and what happens to a story after the person has died. The craft was keeping all of that out of the user's way while keeping consent and control fully in their hands.
In a care product, the edge cases are the main event
Couples sharing an account, a temporarily unavailable Admin, a user who becomes unable to manage their own access. These aren't secondary exceptions to design around later. They're precisely the moments when trust is most at stake. The Ria team's close involvement was what surfaced many of them, and their knowledge of real care situations is a large part of why those moments were handled properly rather than discovered too late.
Phasing is a definition, not a deletion
The MVP wasn't the full vision with features lopped off at the end. It started from the smallest complete experience that still delivered meaning, then grew. Modular flows (each built as states like listening, processing, confirming, recovering) meant the underlying technology could change without the user's journey being redesigned around it.
What we'd do differently
Validate earlier, and directly, with users aged 65 to 90. The research base and the Ria team's domain knowledge gave us a strong foundation, but live observation would have tested assumptions about voice interaction, pace and terminology sooner. We'd also keep a formal decision log from day one, because a product this interconnected generates a hundred small rulings about privacy, roles and consent that are far easier to honour, and to share across both teams, when they're written down.
Closing Reflection
An effective digital product doesn't begin with pages or screens. It begins with a clear understanding of the people it serves and the decisions it needs to support, and in Ria’s case, with a client who arrived already holding much of that understanding. The shared challenge was simplifying a genuinely complex, genuinely sensitive proposition without flattening its emotional depth, using the website to carry a visitor from recognition to trust, and the app to turn that trust into something an older person could actually live with day to day. Designing for older adults, it turned out, isn't about reducing an experience until it's basic. It's about removing the unnecessary complexity while carefully protecting dignity, choice and the richness of a life worth recording. That it worked owes as much to a close, candid working relationship as to any single design decision.
Ria Website: www.ria-app.com