Tutorial Creation, Training and Age Tech Product Adoption
November 11th in the Rethinking Aging Club Products for 50+ Room, we were delighted to have Benjamin Surmi, head of Koelsch Innovation Lab and Abbie Richie, founder of Senior Savvy join us. In addition, Ryan Kawamoto, Regional Director for Senior Planet at Avenidas; Aaron Podolny, Co-founder and CTO of Scribe; Nathalie de Vazeille, VP Marketing, StackCare; Doug Sullivan, RN and Clinical Training Coordinator at HEAL. Many helpful insights about tutorials and training were discussed. You have here the summary and the audio transcript is included.
Tutorial Creation, Training and Product Adoption Rethinking Aging Club Nov 11 Highlights:
For Facility Staff:
Diagrams are essential
Find a way to measure usage and reward it
Especially for older adults:
Diagrams are essential
Provide captions
Talk slowly and clearly
A deeper voice is easier to hear
For caregivers and older adults:
Provide an alternative to scrolling back and forth in a video
Tool to create tech tutorials:
Scribe
Kudos to Lindsey Bly (marketing and listed as media contact on Scribe website) who managed to get Scribe’s co-founder / CTO to this Rethinking Aging Clubhouse session with an hour’s notice. Thus you can hear our surprised delight that Aaron was in the room at the beginning of the OtterAI audio transcript.
Products for 50+ was founded by Michael Phillips (AARP Technology), Rick Robinson (AARP Innovation Labs) and Steve Ewell (CTA Foundation/CES). Debbie Howard (Aging Matters International/Japan Market Research Network) is a frequent moderator for this room, and I am the founder of Rethinking Aging Club.
Otter AI Fully Captioned Audio Recording
Transcript Highlights
Michael Phillips 1:10
Today we’re talking about adoption services. I’m Michael Phillips, I’m with AARP and love to host this this room. Thoughts are my own. I think that that, you know, a lot of the work that we’ve been doing around identifying the tech trends and the barriers to technology, solutions that help people as they age are experience design clues that help across all products. So we may be focused on on some of the technology and digital experience work but I think that it helps out across across channels. One thing that I focus a lot of my work on that there are a lot of technology companies that don’t necessarily focus on the aging market or don’t know how to design adoption experiences effectively for older adults, even though they’re very successful tech companies. So that that’s a problem that I’m hoping to solve for and we’re trying to solve for would love to talk maybe later in the, in the broadcast or the meeting here about some of the tactics and solutions that we found that sort of help drive better experiences, drive adoption, drive awareness, and create, especially a confidence and empowerment with people who may not be non digital natives. But I know, Ryan, who’s on the frontlines of a lot of this probably has a lot of great, great how to experience and I know you have to leave early Ryan so if it’s okay with everyone, I would love to take it over to Ryan for thoughts.
Ryan Kawamoto 3:16
I’m Ryan Kawamoto. I’m Regional Director for Senior Planet at Avenidas, which is actually under the umbrella of OATS Older Adult Technology Services from AARP. It’s great to be here again, just briefly this morning. There’s quite a few angles, I think to approach this topic. I think one just for me locally and being on the front lines working closely with a team of instructors – we call them technology trainers – is that really from day one we started to really think to the importance of hospitality and providing support and making sure that we’re creating a safe welcoming environment. I think I might have mentioned this before, but when we started at least locally, looking at barriers to entry, one common theme that came up was fear and that could be fear of the technology, fear of being in a space and being humiliated in front of others. Fear of using a device and having it either break or become antiquated and then having to learn something new. And just the fear in general of a new experience. And so how do we break that down to make sure the participant is really feeling supported all the way through? And there are quite a few ways that we do that – where we are intentionally creating a curriculum that’s for older adults, meant to equate commodity between participants. When we were in person before the pandemic, it was making sure that we’re having a smaller class size. And one thing too, that Thomas Kamber, our founder and executive director is really focused on, is fighting ageism and being a social change model. So that’s been really built in in everything that we do. And part of that is to say that, why is it that technology tends to focus on youth culture, when older adults deserve the latest and greatest technology as well and it came very much in my forefront when we opened up our space in 2019. And we were getting the latest devices, like we have four Oculus’es, we had a PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch and everyone is asking ‘Where do you work’? Oh, you work for older adults. That wasn’t making sense to them. And so how do we fight that narrative? How do we break that down? And then one piece too, I think is it’s really important to have that substance that it’s great to create a welcoming environment that at the end of the day, if your materials aren’t up to date, it’s very hard for older adults to follow. What we do is when we’re in person, we’re having books that were printed in large print made to create real relevant, hands on exercises. So it’s not just how do you use your notes app, it’s how do you create a grocery list and then go to the grocery store and use your notes app where you have all the items you need to purchase. One other piece to that I think, I’ve been trying to think through this a lot in terms of Older Adult Technology Services, which became an affiliate of AARP last January. And part of the thought process there was thinking through why was affiliation attractive both for OATS and for AARP and I think it’s been a dream come true. Where we have been really focused on a regional approach where we have locations in California, we have our San Antonio, Texas, Colorado, Maryland, and New York, and really focusing on those specific regions but at the same time, then having a larger operations where when Apple comes out with an update, it’s not just a team of one having to scramble to update all the books, we have a whole team of curriculum that can provide that overhead rather quickly whereas I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I’m just by myself out here in California. So, a lot there. I’ll maybe stop there. But I welcome any questions. I actually love to hear from Benjamin and Aaron, and any others. Thanks so much.
Linda Sherman 7:19
Benjamin, do you have any questions for Ryan?
Benjamin Surmi 7:26
Just so I can understand a little bit better. I’m still new to learning about some of what AARP is doing in the innovation area. Is this focused on helping seniors who want to learn technology giving them a kind of way to learn or is it more focused on helping product designers connect with their end users?
Ryan Kawamoto 7:46
Yeah, great question and sorry, that I didn’t explain our mission. So our mission is to empower older adults through technology. So we have five impact areas. Those include: creative expression, financial literacy, civic engagement. But really, at the end of the day, what we say is that it’s not just about turning on and off an iPad it’s how do you use that iPad to connect with a loved one? So we offer classes, now we’ve been offering them virtually ever since the pandemic hit but before we were offering classes in person specifically focused on older adults and having them feel comfortable using technology, whether that be social media, the Android operating system or the Mac OS system, but really creating spaces for older adults to really thrive in using technology to enhance their lives
Benjamin Surmi 8:39
Based on what you’ve learned, from doing this experience, any advice you would give to a new product designer? Or especially in the tech space, who’s going to be creating what will teach their people, their end users how to use their product any, like two things that you would say we should all know?
Ryan Kawamoto 8:59
Yeah, I think that’s a great question. You know, I should be careful that I don’t know if I can even provide us a lot of expertise there. But one thing would be that, it really is a unique experience being in our classroom with the older adult participants. I’ll mention that we have a technology trainer that had over 30 years of experience in the classroom. And so we just thought that would be a natural transfer of skills into teaching an iPad, and I remember her first day in the space. She said okay, ‘everyone turn on your iPad’, thinking as if it was her being in a classroom. ‘Everyone open up your book to page one’, everyone turned on their iPad, there are different screens. The apps were configured differently on each iPad. And it really brought forward the sense of having the user come first, especially when it comes to the training and trying to think through everything that users going to experience in either that classroom or using a product. I think that’s the first and foremost thing that we’ve learned, and then to thinking through how, at least from our end, how do we provide comprehensive support. So we have a free toll free National hot line, if any older adult has any issues, they can call that hotline from 9am to 5pm. Eastern time Monday through Friday. We provide tech talks, which is coaching in tech support in a one on one session, it usually starts on the phone, and then if it makes sense, we switch over to Zoom. We’ve been doing programming in other languages. So what we’ve done is – we call them explore tech lectures where it’s a session where you go over information and then we created a secondary session where people can ask questions. One important thing for our courses is that we started to recognize the importance of instructor office hours. So because some of our participants will bring their own iPad even though we would highly encourage that they use our own because then everything would match, but just trying to think through visual impairment issues, audio issues, we are now actually kind of at square one of trying to think through best practices for hybrid learning as we’re hoping to reopen. And really again, going back to the Design Thinking components of what’s most important, making sure that both the older adult participants that are online and in the classroom are getting, world class experience of full support and so right now we’ve just experimented with having a technology trainer be in the Zoom Room, in addition to having a technology trainer being on site and even learning there that the two have to work really well together almost like a cohesive team in predicting what might come up and and going back and forth. I don’t know if that answers your question, but again, because I think we’re coming at it from an angle of how do we provide technology knowledge in the most supportive way. But from a design standpoint, I do think it goes back to that older adult user experience being first and foremost.
Benjamin Surmi 11:58
Thank you so much, Linda. was super helpful.
Linda Sherman 12:01
I really loved what you said about the people in the class sitting there and their iPads are configured differently and it’s hard to follow along, little tips like that, that you get from people who do the actual training. And I’d like to have Abbie chime in on that kind of aspect of it because she does training of older adults. And if you can introduce yourself, Abbie, thank you.
Abbie Richie 12:32
Hi, hello everyone. It’s so great to see you and hear you all here. First. I just want to say hello to Ryan. I’ve been following you for a while so I am thrilled to be able to participate in this conversation and hear from you. I’m a huge fan of OATS, I’m a huge fan of Senior Planet curriculum. In fact, have based a lot of my own curriculum off of yours so thank you. Thank you. Thank you and what I do, I am the founder of Senior Savvy, which release textures for older adults so they can excel in today’s world. I started this company in 2018. And originally I was teaching these classes at different communities, resort senior living communities in the Phoenix area where I live but took them on to zoom in 2020 and yes that did add a whole different spin on the user experience because you can’t see exactly what it is that they’re looking at. Right. So what I like to emphasize in all of my workshops is the basics. I focus on the basics, because no matter what, I know that my students and they’re in their 80s and 90s and sometimes one hundreds. I know that my students will grow in confidence when they have a basic understanding and foundation of the topic. So I may talk about the history of Wi Fi for instance, or the history of Bluetooth. Where did that word name come from? And then I may explain Bluetooth and the connection and how it works but I never ever get complicated in my explanations. I could get technical but I don’t. I have this principle. It’s KISS: Keep It Simple Senior and I stick to it. I know there are many ways I can explain that technology but I don’t go there ever because I want them to just know what it means. And while they may never completely understand, I don’t even know if I do but while they may not understand how AirDrop works as long as they have heard the term, and they have a basic understanding of it, then when they do encounter it, they’ll know what it is. And it’s that type of confidence I have found that leads to empowerment, and that empowerment allows them to engage with other people and to find answers independently.
Linda Sherman 15:17
Abbie, when you talk about finding answers independently, we come to tutorials and I’m sure in what you do and and training older adults that you’ve had to deal with lots of tutorials and I just wonder if you have any top tips or good ones you’ve found, terrible ones you’ve found, what can be done about that?
Abbie Richie 15:47
You mean for training tutorials
Linda Sherman 15:50
for products. Yes. For products. So we’re talking about the adoption of age tech products and what can be done to onboard older adults and the people who support them to use them?
Abbie Richie 16:14
Yeah, that’s a good question. What I’ve noticed in a lot of product demos is that they fail to provide a diagram. I know that my clients love to have a diagram that points out all of the features, and exactly what this button does and what this button does. And so many of our modern devices don’t come with a manual or a diagram. So I like to always provide a diagram in terms of a handout that they can refer back to when they need to be reminded what a certain thing functions as. The other thing that I’ve noticed in many product demos is that the speaker speaks too fast. And it’s something I try to do even right now. I’m trying to speak faster to you guys, because you’re a lot younger than my average student. But typically when I’m doing a demonstration I speak slowly and clearly because I know that that is a limitation for a lot of my clients that processing and then the other thing I’ve always tried to do is add subtitles or captions to my videos. I do these in Zoom. During my workshops. I always have them running there. If I’m in PowerPoint, I use the subtitles in PowerPoint, because this is how we watch TV and this is how my clients watch TV with the subtitles or the captions on them. So as often as you can, give a handout like a diagram and use subtitles and have whoever’s doing the demo for you speak slowly and clearly without an accent. And the deeper the voice is usually the better for most people who may have hearing aids.
Linda Sherman 18:08
I love that last one that you added because I know that unfortunately some of us, including me speak in a range that is hard for some older adults to hear. Those are really great tips. I just wanted to mention that one of my first articles on Boomer Tech Talk was on how to use a Comcast remote. We made a big illustration of the remote with arrows to every button and what it does, because Comcast never provided that – which is amazing. It was a really good thing for you to point out that older adults really appreciate diagrams with what does this button do and what does that button do. If you’ve ever seen somebody with a remote control hitting everything – you know what that’s like. Did you have anything else on that Abby?
Abbie Richie 19:25
Just happy to hear you say that about the Comcast remote because I have printed out so many of those remotes and creating my own diagram. I always keep them in my toolbox. Binders if I’m going to go meet with a client, for instance, or just have them scanned in handy to send to someone if they need them because again, it’s just always overlooked and it’s something that I know my student is looking for before they feel that they can confidently and independently use this new piece of technology.
Linda Sherman 20:03
Great thank you so much. As we get to diagramming things I’d like to let Benjamin talk about Scribe. So we are so lucky to have Aaron here today as well from Scribe so can we go to that Benjamin? Thank you. Can you please also introduce yourself Benjamin?
Benjamin Surmi 20:29
Absolutely. My name is Benjamin. I’m Director of Koelsch Innovation Lab over at Koelsch Communities, a company with about 40 senior living communities in eight different states. I’m a gerontologist. Shout out to Martin Nochez who’s in the room. He is a consultant that is an incredible guy and he directed me Scribe and I absolutely love it. I was working with an age tech product that we were implementing in our company. And I was creating the internal training on how to use it because it really didn’t have much. Like they had a couple of PDFs and that was about it. I know my team of 2000 employees really struggles with some very basic technologies. So I was doing screenshots and putting arrows going into things like click here first and click here, add a resident by doing this and just deactivate a resident, print their profile and here’s how to do it. Taking me forever. And then my good friend Martin, my colleague was like, Well, you have to try Scribe. I go in there and I’m like, No way. I could have saved the last two months of my life if I had just known about Scribe, so I’m not gonna say much more than that. Aaron, you’re the Chief Technology Officer. Why don’t you tell everybody what Scribe is and how it can change their life if they’re trying to create a product tutorial.
Linda Sherman 21:56
And I also want to mention that there’s a link to Scribe, it’s really simple though, ScribeHow.com, in the pinned link, which is the event link for today. Please go ahead, Aaron.
Aaron Podolny 22:10
Thank you so much. I feel like I’ve learned so much from everyone who’s spoken so far. So really happy to be here today. And just a quick background. I’m the CTO at Scribe. And you can basically think of Scribe as a tool that lets you automatically generate a step by step guide, as you do a task. So you basically just turn on Scribe, do the task as you normally would. And then you can basically crop screenshots with sort of an indicator of where to click or type and then an instruction as well, like click the Submit button. And the goal here is just to make it really easy to share how to use software, but also allow learners to work at their own pace. One of the things that we think is a real downside to video tutorials is that someone using them has to kind of like pause, often rewind, to pick up something that they might have missed, whereas a step by step guide enables the learner to just work at their own pace. Please feel free to check out ScribeHow.com. We have a generous free version of the product. You can just go and get started with that.
Benjamin Surmi 23:45
Aaron. So just to recap, you actually do the thing you want your user to do. And by the time you’re done doing it, you have a tutorial done for you, right you’re just done with it.
Aaron Podolny 24:01
Yeah, that’s exactly right. That was way more interesting than what I just said. So thank you.
Benjamin Surmi 24:07
I was starting to read the blog posts that either you or your co founder just posted about your 30 million that you just raised to really make this go crazy. Can you just give us a quick summary of where you see Scribe going in the future like what’s your real mission in the world?
Aaron Podolny 24:26
We want to enable everyone to feel comfortable using technology and also sharing what they know. I think one of the things that’s been most exciting about working on Scribe is to see how empowering it is to let let people who often are acknowledged for the things they’ve been able to figure out to then share that with others and get a great response. We’ve seen such a wide range of users. Because there’s just such a proliferation of new software tools that are often complicated, whether they’re used in the workplace or used at home. We see this world where basically, we can just empower everyone to help each other with these tools. And I mean, right now the way Scribe is used is often one to one or within classrooms or within companies. But one of the directions that we’re really excited to go is to eventually create a community where people can share tutorials that they’ve made with a much broader group of Scribe users. That’s not something we have today, but it is something that we’re actively working on.
Benjamin Surmi 25:56
That’s so super cool, because I see what you’re saying. Like, let’s say an older adult, who has just figured out how to do some cool thing with Excel they never knew how to do could just have Scribe watching them, do it and then now they can share it with their entire club of, let’s say, genealogy club that they’re working with and look, look what I just figured out how to do. And now they can share that with all their friends on their club, because you’ve empowered them to do that and they don’t have to pay an expert to come and do that for them.
Aaron Podolny 26:25
Yeah, that’s exactly right. It’s been a really virtuous cycle of encouraging people to learn so that they can then teach others. I think it’s almost fundamental to the human experience. Just that experience when we feel good when we help others and at Scribe obviously, we really want to be part of that.
Benjamin Surmi 26:52
And just to be clear, it will create either a PDF, or it will create a shareable link that can either be embedded in a website or website tutorial, or can be shared as a link. So it’s very diverse in the way you’re able to get that information to the end user. Is that correct?
Aaron Podolny 27:08
Yeah, that’s exactly right. There’s there’s a few other sharing options as well, but those are by far the two most popular. After you’re done recording, you can edit it, add more context, add additional instructions, but when you’re ready to share it, you can get that shareable link and you can send it via email or a messenger or you can export it to PDF, however the recipient is most comfortable receiving the information.
Benjamin Surmi 27:42
Very cool. Then anybody else have questions?
Linda Sherman 27:54
I just wanted to say that I have a product that is not an online product, it’s a physical product. But listening to this really helps me especially when you talk about trying to use a video and needing to scroll back and forth to get to where you want to be. I now have written protocols and I have videos with captions. But what I could really also do is screenshots from the video, have certain segments embedded into a protocol so that the people can absorb it at their own pace. And I think that’s a really good point about having to scroll back and forth. So I appreciated that.
Aaron Podolny 28:56
Oh, just yeah, a minor point here. One of the things we’ve seen is people use Scribe and like if they were comfortable making video tutorials. And I will say one of the wonderful things about video tutorials is you get the emotional connection of just there being someone presenting. And for some learners, that’s really wonderful as well. And so what we’ve seen is people will sometimes turn the video screen recorder that they’re already using and Scribe at the same time, and then they’ll include that link to the Scribe on the video and vice versa and just sort of let the the learner decide what they prefer. Regardless of age, different people have different learning styles and ways that they like to get new information. We can support both.
Linda Sherman 29:55
That’s great to hear. Thank you, Aaron. Please go ahead, Debbie.
Linda Sherman 31:19
There have been tools that you can show your screen and talk and there are lots of YouTubes of people doing that. This is just a much more sophisticated version of that because of the clips and the summary that you you do with Scribe. It sounds like Aaron
Aaron Podolny 31:47
Yeah, I mean and the other thing I was gonna say to Debbie’s point is, one to one learning is still so wonderful. I’m not imagining a world where we move away from that again, that is just such a core human experience – teaching in person. I think with Scribe part of it is we’re just sort of acknowledging that there are limits to how much that that can scale. I think about Benjamin’s story of trying to teach all the members of his staff how to use software, and just being able to record it once and have that resource available can just be really additive. So definitely don’t think this is the only way to learn, it’s just an addition.
Linda Sherman 32:45
Great. Thank you so much, Aaron. I’m glad to see that Rick Robinson has joined us today. Rick is from AARP Innovation Labs. Is there anything that you’d like to add?
Rick Robinson 33:02
Okay I’m sorry I’m in a little bit of a noisy place. Not specifically but I have not tried Scribe and I can definitely see a use case. For not only for us and products that we’re launching, but perhaps even for startups who we’re working, with whom we work with a lot. So I’m definitely going to take a look and I appreciate being educated on that.
Linda Sherman 33:33
Thank you very much. Okay, Nathalie, would you like to talk about what you’ve learned about doing tutorials with StackCare?
Nathalie de Vazeille 33:45
Well, yes, absolutely. Thank you for having me. Very happy to be on today. I was listening with a lot of interest to what Aaron was saying about Scribe. As I was mentioning last week, our product is a passive monitoring system for seniors living alone, aging in place. Our target group is the adult children of the seniors. However, I do find it very important that we also make the seniors understand what this product is about. They never have to actually do anything. The system is completely passive. So they can just, once it’s set up, they basically forget about it. The sensors are so small and they just passively monitor 24/7 their habits and their routines and if there’s any problem they send out information to their to their adult children or caregivers or, whoever has the app on their mobile devices. But I do find it so important that we talk to the seniors because if you just kind of start running over them and telling them it’s AI, it’s data science and all that they get immediately turned off and are not interested in having this set up in their house and they worry about privacy and all that. So I found all this extremely interesting and I’m actually just signed up with Scribe because I want to find out how I can use this, maybe also as a tool to work with the seniors themselves so that they understand that it’s a great product and that they are happy to have it installed in their home and they understand that it gives them actually more independence when they worry about losing their independence and it keeps them healthier and safer and all that but how to bring that across. It’s always a challenge and I’ve been working on a lot of marketing collateral to do that. But I am excited hearing about these new tools. Thank you. My name is Nathalie and I’m done talking.
Linda Sherman 35:36
Thank you, Natalie. I do want to repeat what I said at the beginning of the room. We don’t have replays turned on. But we are recording with Otter AI as we did in the last room and if anybody has gone to Debbie’s LinkedIn and seen what she has pulled together with all the resources for caregivers from last week and we included the Otter AI transcript, which you can follow along with and so forth. So, we are we are doing that and so, if you want to later be able to share this with your friends and so forth. I will eventually get it up for you. So I wanted to go back to Benjamin, who has more to say about onboarding and product adoption and so forth from his very good experience and perspective from Koelsch Communities and his Innovation Lab, Benjamin.
Benjamin Surmi 36:47
Sure. Thanks, Linda. Yeah, I think it’s been a wild ride for the past six years in implementing new programs and products into senior living communities. It’s been very eye opening, because I came in to Gerontology as a wide-eyed, let’s change the world person and then you get into the reality of what each of these communities really is like and how it works and the politics of it and the human nature of in the systems work and you realize how challenging it is to implement even life changing technologies. Like for instance, we partner with Eversound which does incredible work around making it easier for all people, regardless of hearing status to hear exactly what they want to hear whether it’s a TV, a yoga studio, instructor, an art class instructor, the curator of a trip or perhaps a family member who’s coming by to visit. It’s life changing. We have people telling us ‘I haven’t talked to my mom in two years, I can talk to her now.’ I have this person put the headphones on and they say, ‘I haven’t heard almost anything in years. Thank you so much for this. I’ve never watched a movie in years because I couldn’t and I’m watching my favorite movies.’ We have people whose life literally gets changed when they use this device and to implement it and have people use it and learn to use it is getting incredibly challenging.
This topic is very, very interesting to me because as I’ve now piloted multiple products and implemented multiple products, I’ve learned to see patterns by trying to see okay, there could be some differences in the products themselves. Or in how the onboarding happens. It might actually make these life changing products that can reduce falls, increase connection between humans, you know, all kinds of things, could potentially make a difference.
For one thing everybody seems to use some sort of video portal, right? Like almost all the products I work with, it’s like we’ve got a video portal and you know, we’re so excited about this video portal that you can come into and watch you know, these half hour videos and five minute videos on how to use everything. And you know, my staff doesn’t do that. They don’t have time to sit and watch videos about how to use your products. Absolutely. They don’t have time to do that. It’s great to have that resource. I think it’s almost like a necessity, but it’s really not effective. Some of them have, you know, facts and step by step instructions and all those things. Those are really helpful. Especially if it’s printable – one page two page, very, very helpful, but still doesn’t necessarily drive adoption.
Linda and I were talking last night and I was explaining to her, you know from a product designer’s standpoint, or services standpoint, it can look like a big cost center – to really look at the onboarding piece. The better you do, the more it can cost you. But I gave her an example. We work with a company where we lease products from them. And every year our total lease is going down. And it’s because users are not using the product. And so they abandon their lease because every year we have a chance to up or down our lease. And we give our communities the opportunity to choose. And every year I’m losing communities that don’t want use the product and more using lesson and so that’s an example of why this cost center is worth investing in. Because you can land a huge account like ours where you know, some of these companies are making hundreds of 1000s of dollars with us. And we’ll start losing traction simply because the onboarding is not sufficient. So, a few other strategies that I’d love to talk about, but I’m just curious what kind of other experiences product designers or implementers might have as well.
Linda Sherman 41:00
We’re all dying to hear your tips. So, but does anybody else have something? Maybe Doug, there you go. Go ahead. Just focus on the tutorials and onboarding. Thanks.
Doug Sullivan 41:12
Yeah, I like that. Scribe sounds very good. I’m kind of old school where I put together my own PowerPoints in the beginning and then that turned into just recording my Zoom meetings, and then taking that recording and making a tutorial out of that. So I understand the pain of that and I have to teach people at both ends of the ladder from the the patient or the caregiver to the physician and their staff. So it can become overwhelming, considering we have this huge tech challenge in America, where practices are slow to adopt Tech, and then the patients – obviously we’re talking senior patient focus – are challenged to just follow along and have something that makes it easier for them to use. So I could see where exactly what Benjamin was referring to regarding attrition and the fall off over the years. I’ve had provider groups that had a lot of patients on remote patient monitoring and then the following year it’s in half because of non compliance and partially there just wasn’t really good management. I was called in after the fact so it wasn’t my fault. Not that I haven’t made mistakes myself but still. So, this could be definitely utilized. It would have to be, for my purposes, be sold as an enterprise type contract. But I think it’s a great product. And then I also wanted to thank Abbie. I’d like to find out if she has a producer or somebody that we can contact for some of my companies that want to be featured on her show and if that’s a possibility.
Linda Sherman 43:33
What kind of a show do you have Abbie?
Abbie Richie 43:36
I have a TV show. It’s premiering on Saltbox TV. It’s the first streaming channel for older adults and it’s on your Roku. It’s also on online, you don’t need an account or password. It’s Saltboxtv.com.
It hasn’t premiered yet. I’m still in production, and they’ve contracted me for three seasons. So every season contains about six episodes. And the episodes are on the basics. The name of the show is called Senior Savvy with Abbie.
Linda Sherman 44:32
Awesome, congratulations, Abbie. That’s great. I want to make sure that Debbie gets to say something about market research before we leave, and then go back to Benjamin for more of his tips, Debbie.
Debbie Howard 44:55
Thanks, Linda. I’m Debbie Howard. I’m a Japan expert and a market research professional and I’m also a caregiver advocate. And I just wanted to mention because Francis West, one of our regular attendees isn’t here right now – the importance of inclusive design. I think we often find ourselves in the situation where the products are developed with hot shot designers, and no older opinions have been factored in. And of course, you’re going to have a problem with adoption and everything else. So I would just like to make the case for involving research at the beginning stages and also during the development and then after it’s developed, post development to even use market research to develop the tutorials. I’m really sensitive to what Abbie was saying and the Scribe service which is great. Talking slower for older adults and using the subtitles and the diagrams, those are all fantastic ideas. I also wanted to mention just the words, the language that we use. When you do research, you can actually learn what and how the customers talk about things. So that can be very, very valuable going forward in tutorials. And I think the other thing is having live user groups and perhaps even turning some of your early adopters into champions who can teach other other aging population members, who may be your customers, because that also sends a message of “wow I guess I guess I can do it.” It’s not being taught by somebody who’s young and talking fast and, like obviously knows what they’re doing. I find that a lot of our older respondents in the research space, they need more time. They need more time with the technology. They need a gentler, kinder, gentler approach and Abbie knows all about that. I also wanted to speak to the standardization of the devices in the teaching room. You also need to do that in the research environment. We found really early on in the pandemic when we pivoted to everything being online, even qualitative research, that we had to as a research company send out the devices to standardize the products that our respondents were using. And that made it easier for our team (many of whom are younger as well) to work with people in a consistent manner. So there weren’t like 10 or 20 different problems or variations of what was happening but rather, everyone had the same device so we could more easily troubleshoot things. And I just wanted to mention those few things. The language one being the most important of all of that, like using the customer’s language when we’re talking about teaching somebody how to do something.
Linda Sherman 48:30
I love the language reference, Debbie and it’s also good for SEO because if you understand how your end consumer thinks about and talks about your product and their problems that your product solves. Those are the words that you can use in your search engine optimization, called SEO.
Benjamin Surmi 49:53
Sure, yes. And quick note, Abbie and Linda. You both talked about diagrams being really important before Martin, the consultant left. He mentioned that Miro.com is a very easy way to create diagrams. And so just I told him, I would make sure I shared that with everybody. miro.com for making diagrams, and I would definitely assert that a one page diagram that shows what different things do is almost more powerful probably then all the video tutorials in the world, like having those diagrams that are very easy for a team to pull out. Okay, what do I do? Okay, done. Right. That is so, so helpful. And then the second thing here is that there’s a little difference between the requirements of two groups of end users that need to be onboarded. We’re talking about an older adult who’s using the product themselves. And then we’re talking about a huge swath of, of influencers, and these could be people in a senior living community, an activity director, an executive director, a nurse, people in the hospital people in clinical setting. There’s a lot of older adults who are introduced to technology by other people. And so those of us who product design, we have to be thinking about – we’re not just educating the end user, sometimes we’re educating someone who’s got to persuade that person to use it. So using my Eversound example, right? My team needs to know how to use this. But they also need to be comfortable with persuading an older adult to put it on their head and how to help the older adult use that technology. And so that I think in my world, that’s the biggest sticking point is I can teach my team how to use something to do their own job, like how to create a calendar. That’s fairly easy to do, but to teach them how to use a product that they’re going to have to persuade the older adult to use. That’s where I see it breaking down, whether it be telehealth, whether it be some sort of physical device, or electronic device. That is the big gap of onboarding is how do you help them influence that older person, to feel comfortable persuading another human being to adopt something that other person may be resistant to using. So a couple strategies that I have been looking at. Number one, a product team should be thinking about how to ensure that any product usage content is available to be modular and embedded in any learning system that that company already has. So for instance, if we have an internal intranet – most companies have their own portal. So I have to make my employees leave our intranet and go outside and remember a new password and a new username and remember a link and figure out how to get there and maybe be reminded or not that they need to go through certain modules to learn their new technology. So anything that somebody can do to say, hey, this content is Vimeo links, here’s PDFs, you can upload them into your own system or you can direct your team to us. If you don’t have an intranet, I think that’s very important. Meet people where they are already versus trying to get them to come to some other site to do the learning. Second. I believe that many Age Tech products are still sort of relying on onboarding, they’re not creating a product that’s so easy to use, that you don’t need onboarding. Most of us don’t need onboarding to learn how to use Facebook. Right? Most of us didn’t take a class on how to use Facebook. And so especially for the population that’s 20 to 50, who are professionals who are working in let’s say, a senior living community or hospital, they shouldn’t have to use a tutorial to use our product, right? We need to design the products that are easy to use without a tutorial. So that’s not always possible, but we’ve got to shoot for that UX design to be excellent. So we don’t need a tutorial. Third, I think we really need to look at how to make the device or service sticky. Most products that I have piloted have no stickiness to them. What I mean is there’s no incentive to use the product. The only thing that’s getting the employee to use the product with the older adult is they’re being told to use it by their manager. And there’s an altruistic claim that if you use this, the person’s life will be better. But most technology that we go back to has stickiness. Netflix has stickiness such as things movies that will not be available after the end of the month. I’m going to use Facebook because I know that I get a certain kind of credit socially for using it. I’m going to play that game because I’m going to get on the leaderboard. Most of these products have no stickiness to them. So something even as simple as using a fall risk device. If they had just a little Wi-Fi box on there with like a button or something where every time it was used, the buttons pressed or something and I can reward prizes to communities that use the product daily. Right? Like that’s a huge, huge improvement over the current iteration, where there’s literally no accountability built in unless I train managers to build that accountability. And then another strategy is potentially Clubhouse. We’re looking at internally at our company to start using Clubhouse as the venue for having product discussions and using products internally versus Zoom and emailing PDFs, but instead just doing a Clubhouse conversation together. So those were a few a few things that I think we need to think about when onboarding.
Linda Sherman 55:47
That’s great. And you’ve pointed out Benjamin, why you one of the reasons you like Clubhouse is because it’s just audio and you can be anywhere when it’s happening. And I think that’s a very good point and obviously that Clubhouse would be a private Clubhouse. For your group and and to special invitees. Right?
Benjamin Surmi 56:11
Either way but yeah, yeah.
Linda Sherman 56:13
Okay. Well, that would be interesting. That and now that they’ve added pinned links, it makes it much more possible. Because if there’s something you need people to see, you can pin it up there. So that helps a lot. Go ahead, Benjamin.
Benjamin Surmi 56:33
Just said yep, you’re absolutely right.
Linda Sherman 56:35
Okay. All right. So we are at two minutes before the end of the hour. And I just want to point out that in in my LinkedIn post, I’ve also put a link to our last room that Debbie has done a wonderful summary of and to our next room, which is on creating a baseline. So of your health metrics so that when you need it for caregiving or for yourself or for when you’re you’re no longer at your baseline, you can go back and find it. That is so important. And it’s come up many times in these rooms, especially when we talk about caregiving, if only we had a baseline of of, of this and that and we have we’re going to have Hon Pak, who is the Chief Medical Officer for Samsung Electronics America with us and he is going to be very knowledgeable about this subject. And so I hope you’ll be able to come back for that and every Thursday except for we’re going to be dark on Thanksgiving. And on December 2, so the occasion for December 2 Is Mary Furlong’s Longevity Innovation Summit, which many of us will be attending. So we just decided that out of respect and just to make sense we are not going to have a meeting on December 2, but we will be right back the next Thursday and mostly every every Thursday. We will be here at noon, Eastern Time. So we hope that you can join us. Michael, do you have any final words here?
Michael Phillips 58:43
Just wanted to say thank you I learned a lot today about Scribe I can’t wait to go spend some time with it and really thinking through the diagramming versus the videoing versus the articles. That was really helpful for me. We’d love to circle back, Linda at some point to this topic. And really think about the metrics and measurements and proof points and outcomes and how to measure those outcomes. I think that would be an interesting future topic of how we measure adoption, how we, how we measure adoption and all of the support services around adoption. Also for next, next next week. I’m really looking forward to hearing more about the baseline, the baselining. And especially how, how, with the recommendations, how to make it actionable. I’m going to talk to some of my AARP colleagues about coming in that have some insights in this space. And then the last thing I wanted to say is we’ve been a little bit of a trendsetter here, there are a couple of new AARP clubhouse rooms not related to products or tech, but related to other things like caregiving that are in the works. So looking forward over the next few weeks of sharing some of the new AARP related clubhouse rooms that will be coming soon. And thank you, Linda and Debbie and everyone else for being such a trailblazer with this room.
Linda Sherman 1:00:14
That’s great to hear. Michael, thank you so much. You’ll have to let us know when when they’re up so that so that we can all join those clubs.
Michael Phillips 1:00:24
Absolutely will do.
Linda Sherman 1:00:26
Thank you so much.
Doug Sullivan 1:00:28
I have a quick question about the AARP to your clubs and do you let other people kind of discuss their stuff that they’re not like in with United Healthcare or is it exclusive to United Healthcare type
Michael Phillips 1:00:46
contracts for the for the clubhouse rooms that are that are being stood up? They’re just to spark conversation and dialogue and build community around social impact issues such as, such as age discrimination and caregiving, on our rooms or on products. So no, it’s open to that they’re open to everyone. And I think the I think that the, the, I think the idea is to hear all the different types of perspectives that are out there and share one amongst ourselves. You know, I’ll share with you who are still left during the war a little bit over one of the big challenges that we have as an organization coming on clubhouse or any type of social media is having people speaking with themselves versus having people speak for AARP and making a clear distinction and delegation between the two. So those are some of the things that are kind of being worked out in the background. A little behind the scenes info. To answer your question, we love to have other people come and share their perspectives about any range of topics.
Doug Sullivan 1:02:06
Great, thank you.
Linda Sherman 1:02:09
Thank you so much for clarifying that. Michael. People always have questions about AARP and how it it works in all the nooks and crannies and and who’s doing what and so forth. It’s such a big important organization, and the most read magazine in America, so thank you for that insight.
Michael Phillips 1:02:33
I know and I’m gonna go try to get more diagrams put in that magazine. It’s too text heavy.
Linda Sherman 1:02:40
That’s great.
Debbie Howard 1:05:43
Oh, thank you on November 22, at 4pm Eastern Christina Keys and I will be co moderating a new room called shifting the culture of caregiving, and that will be under the Rethinking Aging umbrella. We hope you all can join us please we’re gonna come up with some themes, we’re working on it now.
Debbie Howard 1:06:21
I just wanted to thank you for mentioning Veterans Day because I think it’s really important that we all remember and many of our veterans are not only a little bit older, but disabled. So there are caregivers attached to most veterans as well. And I’d like to thank them for their service.