Seasons of Care Native Elder Health Guide

Challenge:

Members of federally recognized American Indian tribes are granted a legal right to health care services funded through the federal government. Despite this, American Indian elders experience significant barriers in the health care system, resulting in poorer health and a lower life expectancy than other aging populations.

Solution:

Translate the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation-Southwest’s community-driven, mixed-method study of Native Elders’ experiences with the health care system into an accessible website called the Seasons of Care Native Elder Health Guide, which provides culturally relevant, up-to-date information, resources, and tools about health care and health insurance.

Process:

Trifoia’s front-end developer kicked off the project by consulting with PIRE-Southwest staff and affiliates, in order to establish project goals and deadlines. The Statement of Work drafted from these discussions outlined parameters for translating PIRE’s research-driven insights into an intuitive and accessible website for elders to navigate.

The developer took a user experience-centered approach to architecting the Seasons of Care Native Elder Health Guide site, starting with a site wireframe to layout content and functionality requirements for each page.

The research insights, corresponding to the four seasons of the year and encompassing issues like legal resources, nutrition, Medicaid, and long-term care, were translated by the front-end developer into categorized hyperlinks on the website. Website links take users to subpages with PIRE insights and resources presented as interactive elements and infographics.

Some pages from the Seasons of Care brand Guidelines. Brand guidelines help define accessibility, colors and logo use.

Meanwhile, branding guidelines were created by Trifoia’s brand manager. Created in accordance with accessibility best practices, design features like logos, colors, and fonts were selected with this population of users’ unique needs in mind.

The site underwent a full website accessibility compliance review. An accessibility widget was embedded in the site, giving users access to a wide range of accessibility features like text size and screen contrast adjusting, link highlighting, text spacing, line height adjustment, and more.

The end product is an interactive, media-rich site that fully conforms with federal Americans with Disabilities Act Section 508 requirements and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The Seasons of Care team can now share this website with Elders, their families, and healthcare professionals to help them navigate the healthcare and health insurance systems so they can receive the best possible care.