myryman App
Project
myRyman
Client
Ryman
Designing for the overlooked user
myRyman is the resident app for Ryman Healthcare's retirement villages across New Zealand and Australia, built for users with an average age of 80, to AAA accessibility standards, without compromising on craft.
98% weekly active users
76% of independent households on board
Gold — Best Design Awards 2024
Good Design Australia winner
01
THE PROBLEM
Technology forgets people over 70
Ryman Healthcare houses thousands of residents across New Zealand and Australia. Village life runs on information, activity schedules, event bookings, medication deliveries, home-care visits, and most of it moved on paper and noticeboards.
The residents averaged 80 years of age. Vision decline, reduced dexterity, and low confidence with technology are the norm, not the edge case. Most digital products treat this audience as an afterthought; we made them the entire brief.
The challenge: build a digital front door to village life that a 90-year-old with a tremor and glaucoma could use independently, and that would still feel considered, warm, and modern.
02
Research
150+ residents, 250+ hours, zero assumptions
We ran interviews, co-design sessions, and usability testing directly in the villages, 150+ residents, over 250 hours. We didn't test on residents; we designed with them, in a continuous feedback loop that ran for the life of the product.
Three findings shaped everything that followed:
1. Complex gestures don't exist for this audience. Long-press, drag, multi-finger… none of it was understood or discoverable. Physical buttons and switches were the mental model residents brought with them. So we restricted the entire app to taps and simple swipes. Every feature had to survive that constraint.
2. Colour alone communicates nothing. Age-related vision changes meant a green tick and a red cross could look identical. Every status in the app is expressed three ways at once: icon + label + colour. Nothing relies on colour alone.
3. Choice is cognitive load. Interfaces that show every possible action force residents to work out which ones apply. We inverted it: the app only ever displays actions a user can actually take. Inactive options don't grey out, they leave.
Simulate vision
myRyman headline
This is a legible paragraph text size
Common headline
This is a common paragraph text size
AAA
Accessibility
vs
Booked
vs
Unread
(Icon)
vs
(Icon + Label + Colour)
Only display action a user can take
Inactive actions slide away
Next step
Simulate Inactive
03
DESIGN DECISIONS
Every decision traces to a finding
Statuses that can't be misread. Booked, waitlisted, postponed, cancelled, each state pairs an icon, a plain-English label, and a colour, on backgrounds tinted for contrast. Tested to AAA visual accessibility standards.
Interactions that mirror the physical world. Press, drag, release, that's the full vocabulary. Cards respond like objects: they depress on touch and slide as you drag, giving continuous feedback that the tap is working.
One layout, every device, every text size. Residents arrive with whatever device a family member handed down, and most run enlarged text. Rather than separate phone and tablet designs, the system scales one layout across four breakpoints, small phones to tablets, so nothing breaks when text grows.
Empty states that teach. A blank screen is a dead end for a low-confidence user. Every empty state explains what the screen is for and offers exactly one next step.
04
THE DESIGN SYSTEM
100% custom, built to evolve
Off-the-shelf component libraries fail AAA contrast and touch-target requirements, so we built our own: typography sized for legibility at arm's length, oversized touch targets, semantic colour tokens, and status signifiers as first-class components.
The system is tokenised… spacing, radius, and colour roles are variables, which let us migrate the entire app from V1 to V2 naming without redrawing screens. It's a living system: every research round fed component revisions.
05
OUTCOMES
Stunning uptake, in the judges' words
76% of independent households actively use myRyman
98% weekly active users
88% CSAT · 57 NPS
Admin portal shipped alongside, cutting manual work for village staff
"A magic trick of making the complex simple… has ultimately succeeded in making residents' lives better with stunning uptake, engagement and satisfaction metrics." — Judges' comments, Best Design Awards 2024
Best Design Awards 2024: Gold — Value of Design (Emerging Value) · Finalist — Social Good · Finalist — Digital Products
