Re-building the GRCOA Website
GRCOA (Grand River Council of Aging)
10 minute read
Team
My Role
Contributed throughout every stage
Tools Used
Timeline
Isabel U-Perez
Bavneet Sandhu
Jade Weaver
Abibat Egbeyemi
Kaeleigh Gardiner
Therese Ristow
8 months (Sept 2025 - May 2026)
Figma & Figjam
Google Docs
Google Forms
Leanne Witzke
Olivia Bartlett
Mya Certossi
During the UX400 Capstone, my team and I were tasked to help Brantford's GRCOA (Grand River Council of Aging), a non-profit organization, to design an intuitive, scalable digital solution that meets the needs of today’s 45-year-olds while evolving to support them and the community in crafting an age-friendly future over the next 20 years. 🤗
Overview
UX400 Capstone Project
Client Project
Information Architecture
Prototyping
User Research
Contents
Background
Project Objectives and HMW Statement
Initial Client Meeting
Comparative Analysis and Work Plan
User Research
Initial Research and Brainstorming
Background
The Grand River Council on Aging (GRCOA) is a non-profit organization whose mission is to create an age-friendly community with a focus on information-seeking and educational activities. Based specifically on Brantford and Brant County, the GRCOA looks at the eight pillars it takes to be considered an age-friendly community:
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Outdoor spaces and buildings
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Transportation
Social participation
Civic participation and employment
Housing
Community support and health services
Respect and social inclusion
Communication and information
Project Objective & HMW statement
Primary
45-55+ planning for the next stage of life.
Secondary
20-40 (younger ages) trying to build awareness around aging early on.
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👥 Target Users:
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Currently the GRCOA has:
Lack of education and awareness about aging resources and support
There should be:
Risk of underutilization of services due to poor digital infrastructure
Organizational sustainability risks (funding, volunteers, outreach)
Long-term planning for sustainability of both the organization and their resources/services for generations to come.
We created a "how might we" statement around our objective and users so we can refer back to it to keep our team focused on the right problems to solve.
Design an intuitive, scalable digital solution that meets the needs of today’s 45-year-olds while evolving to support them and the community in crafting an age-friendly future over the next 20 years?
How Might We…
🎯 Main Objective: To create an age-friendly community for all residents.
Initial Client Meeting
In order to ensure our team is on the same page, we conducted a group meeting to discuss role allocation, team alignment, and team retrospective (to reflect on our previous group projects outside of this one). We created a calendar to keep us on track and communicated which conditions we work best in, challenges and struggles we face in group environments, ways we prefer to communicate and more.
After a virtual meeting with our client Lucy and Claudio from GRCOA, we conducted 3 rounds of affinity mapping, and empathy mapping to sort through and understand the information they gave us. From this, we understood what Lucy and Claudio wanted from us, what our objectives were, and what the GRCOA provided for the Brantford community.
Comparative Analysis & Work Plan
The environmental analysis and SWOT analysis for the GROCA examines current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of the organization based on examination of internal resources, community events, website, and stakeholder information.
Given the project scope is focused on digital solutions and the aging population audience, we selected four organizations with similar audiences types and contexts who also use a digital solution as a primary means of servicing their users (Hamilton Council on Aging, BC Healthy Communities, Age Friendly Niagara and HelpAge Canada). By analyzing key elements of each website, we uncovered several opportunities for enhancement as well as potential shortcomings related to content delivery, flexibility of format, and technical and heuristic considerations.
We also review four non-profit organizations with primary users around 45 years old (Glassdoor, Career Foundation, Common Good Plan, Mayo Clinic) to get a better understanding of the digital environments our target audience are currently using. By analyzing current patterns, features, and media types used we can better understand gaps in the GRCOA site and opportunities to tailor the new solution to better meet user needs and preferences.
To ensure we stay aligned, we have created a Gantt chart and a 7-month calendar to clearly map out our project activities, timelines, and deliverables. Both tools will help our team prepare for any contingencies by showing us how tasks connect, when or why certain tasks can run into delays, and ultimately how we can work around them.
For more details, read our full Deliverable #1 document. We presented our deliverable to our class, professor and client succinctly.
View our presentation slides below.
User Research & Results
To understand our target users, our team conducted open, semi-structured interviews that included contextual inquiry.
Our team selected this method to get detailed information around users’ challenges, motivations, behaviours, wants, goals, and toolkit, while being able to gather initial impressions, expectations, and workflows during their walkthrough on the website.
We then created a screener survey. To ensure we gathered meaningful insights based on the project’s scope, we used the following criteria to select participants:
We aimed for 15+ research participants based on recommendations by industry experts like the Nielsen Norman Group (NNG).
They suggest a minimum of 5 participants per user type to make sure there is enough data to create a well-informed persona.
Although we are not creating personas for this deliverable, the same principles apply to creating archetypes.
Participants must be within the 40-55 age range.
Since our chosen methodology is contextual inquiry, participants must be willing to share their screens during the sessions.
Participants could be from any location in Ontario.
We then created a detailed script, planned and scheduled interviews with selected screener participants.
We successfully conducted 20 interviews with a duration of 45 minutes to an hour each.
We had a minimum of 2 note-takers and 1 facilitator for each session. During the interview process, we asked participants to screen-share the GRCOA website and show us their usual process or workflow when evaluating this online community resource for the first time. In addition, participants were asked targeted questions related to:
With each research session, we synthesized the information by coding it. We started by creating a codebook, and labeling each line of information said by the participant with the codebook.
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Their experiences, habits, and preferences around finding and using community resources, online resources, and future planning.
Challenges or concerns they’ve encountered during these experiences.
Their wants and views on opportunities for improving these experiences.
Archetypes, Journey Maps, Storyboards
Constraints
Prototyping
Iterating & Testing
Final Prototype & Impact
Conclusion