When we interviewed Brian, he wasn't in a good mood - a scammer who claimed to be an IRS official recently swindled his 80-year-old mom. "My mom lives alone. I had no idea what happened until she sent her money." Brian sighed, "It is not just the money she lost. It took her a long time to recover from her emotional turmoils and self-blames."

Brian's mom is not alone. Each year, elderly Americans lose as much as $37 billion to financial scams. In this project, I led the interaction design of an AI system, “VOYCE” that will protect seniors against financial scams.

Type: Voice User Interface, Mobile Application
My Role: UX Design & Usability Testing
Collaborators: Elsa Ho (User Research & PM), Kasturi Dani (Visual Design & Branding)
Timeline: 6 month
Sponsor: BlinkUX

Secondary Research: Read through reports from the Federal Trade Commission, U.S. Department of Justice, Financial Fraud Research Center, and Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Subject Matter Experts: Interviewed five subject matter experts.

Field Visit and In-depth Interviews: Conducted field visits and in-depth interviews with five senior citizens and five family members of senior fraud victims.

INDEPENDENCE

Providing a sense of independence to seniors.   

EFFICIENCY

Delivering timely alerts to family members, without burdening them with excessive details.  

ACCESSIBILITY

Respecting seniors citizens’ routines, constraints and behavioral preferences.

ADAPTABILITY

Adapting to new types of phone scams quickly and effectively.

We narrowed down more than 50 ideas into six directions:  scammer biometric characteristics identification, AI assistant, senior well-being monitoring, bank accounts catered for seniors, senior peer support, and easy fraud report.

We identified “AI system” as the most promising direction to prototype.

"Joyce" is the Artificial assistant living inside "Voyce"”

Through a voice-based interaction, the artificial assistant Joyce cautions seniors and prompts seniors with the next steps. We designed speech scripts based on the flowchart. Below is a few sample clips.

Blocking Scam Calls:  

We prototyped the AI assistant Joyce (Wizard of Oz prototyping) and went through the main scenarios with seniors. Observing how seniors interacted with the audio prototypes taught us how to improve the voice-based interaction system.

We also showed the system’s script and asked senior participants to revise it after interacting with the audio prototype. It helped us make the scripts more tailored to seniors’ specific needs.

Simplicity: Seniors expressed a desire for simplified conversation with the system. We the script to ask only yes or no questions. If seniors have to make a choice, Joyce will limit the options to two items.      

BEFORE
Joyce: “What do you want to do next?”
Senior: ...

AFTER
Joyce: “Do you want to end the conversation?”
Senior: "Yes."

Progressive disclosure: Seniors were overwhelmed by too many requests at one time. We modified the script to progressively guide the senior by presenting only one task at a time.                    

BEFORE
Joyce: “What can I do for you?”
Senior: “Add contact.”
Joyce: “Sure. Please provide the person's name and phone number.”
Senior: ...

AFTER
Joyce: “What can I do for you?”
Senior: “Add contact.”
Joyce: “Sure. What is the name of the person you would like to add?”
Senior: “Nancy.”
Joyce: "What is Nancy's phone number?"
Senior: "It's 111-111-111.

BEFORE

This chart gives a list of secondary stakeholders.

• Voyce hosts its database on the cloud through cloud computing services.

• Voyce collaborates with existing scammer blocking services to enrich its scam database.

• Voyce works with Research Centers to update its fraud detection algorithms.

• Voyce extracts public companies' information from seg.gov to evaluate if the call is coming from credible organizations.