The Dementia Journey.
Client
Hilma van Slooten
Country
The Netherlands
Work
System Design
Design Strategy
Web Design (UX & UI)
Hilma van Slooten had two parents with Dementia; together, we created a platform that values people's lives with this diagnosis.
During this challenging period, Hilma found out that the Dutch healthcare system gives up on you when you have this illness. It is not about living but waiting for your end. She experienced that her parents were still full of life.
Hilma had a lot of questions for which she didn't immediately found an answer. That is when she founded "Regie op Dementie" (The Dementia Journey). Regie op Dementie is an online platform where children of parents with dementia can find links, tips, and articles about living with the illness in Haarlem, the Netherlands. For this project, we designed the journey and helped determine the categories, we created the platform, the branding, and all the visuals for Regie op Dementie. Often for us at Unbeaten Studio, the actual design work is in the conversations we have with our clients. In this case, Hilma. The great thing about her is that she is fast and direct; she knows where she wants to go. We just needed to get the correct information out during our meaningful design talks.
Below you can see our design process and what we did in each phase.
Explore
Since this was a very personal & emotional project for Hilma (Regie op Dementie), it was necessary to listen and ask questions. We wanted to understand Hilma's feelings, motivations, and the (health)care system around dementia. We only discovered that the Dutch health care system and Hilma had two very different points of view.
Dutch health care system is about waiting till the end.
Regie op Dementie is about helping children supporting their parents with dementia to living a meaningful life with the illness.
Design
The initial question of Regie op Dementie was to help set up a blog website, but we soon found out that it would stay short. We needed to create a platform where you follow the dementia journey of a person. We were finding the answers to questions people might have in the different dementia phases. The answers come in blogs, tips, tricks, books, links in six different categories.
Visualize
Graphically it was essential to visualise dementia journey in an obvious way. It had to be very easy to understand. We created a set of icons for both the journey and categories. With all the visual elements, we could design the UX & UI and build the online platform Regie op Dementie. Interestingly enough, we flipped the design process; after everything was done we created the logo because that felt like the final piece.
Launch
Regie op Dementie was released in September 2019. A platform for living with dementia based on a journey with Hilma holding your hand on the journey with her weekly personal blogs of her own experience. In this phase, we support Regie op Dementie to translate feedback into improvements to the platform and advise on how to proceed.
Grow
Regie op Dementie is an ongoing project. We support the Dementia project with:
Designing a series of design research sessions to help discover the right value proposition and revenue models for Regie op Dementie. Currently, the platform is focused on the city of Haarlem, but the dream is to help children of parents with dementia throughout the Netherlands.
Strategise future steps of Regie op Dementie
Supporting RoD with the development of a webinar. Design call to actions create a landing page.
Discover more about the dementia journey here:
What does Hilma van Slooten think of collaborating with Unbeaten Studio:
“Jeroen Spoelstra of Unbeaten Studio has the great quality to really dive into your world and then design what is needed by your target group!”
“Marce is the one who sharpened my logo to perfection”