Helping Caregivers Find the Best Assistive Tech
A product developed for the Senatsverwaltung für Wissenschaft, Gesundheit und Pflege Berlin, with care and gerontology expertise contributed by Albatros gGmbH.
"My Technik Finder" is a project developed for the Senate Administration for Science, Health, and Care in Berlin. It supports caregivers, their relatives, and advisors in navigating the complex and constantly evolving market of Pflege 4.0 products, helping them find the right assistive technology.
A multidisciplinary brief from the public sector
My Technik Finder was commissioned by the Senatsverwaltung für Wissenschaft, Gesundheit und Pflege Berlin, the Berlin Senate Administration for Science, Health, and Care. The brief was to help caregivers, their relatives, and professional advisors navigate the fragmented and rapidly evolving market of Pflege 4.0 products, the technical-assistive devices that increasingly support care in Germany.
The product was developed in close collaboration with Albatros gGmbH, a Berlin-based social provider whose team contributes the operational expertise from care, the health sciences, and gerontology. They were not a client. They were the domain partner who made it possible to design a product that respects how care actually works in practice rather than how it looks on paper.
Within the team, I worked as Design Lead, coordinating one technical specialist and one UI designer. My role spanned the strategic and the executional: I ran the stakeholder workshops with the Senatsverwaltung and Albatros, designed and facilitated the persona and use-case workshops, produced the personas and user journeys, defined the information architecture and the app flow, and owned the interaction design. The user-testing programme with elderly end users, described in the next section, fed back into each design iteration.
The Pflege 4.0 market is complex and rapidly evolving, making it difficult for elderly individuals and those in need of care, especially those with limited digital skills, to find and identify the right assistive products online.
To help users accurately identify their needs, we designed a structured set of questions and product filtering keywords. Additionally, we organized and summarized all product information to ensure a quick and comprehensive understanding of available options. For those requiring further assistance, the platform allows users to schedule consultations with experts. They can also print their saved products and information for offline discussions. Given that many users have limited digital experience, we prioritized simplicity by streamlining functionality and minimizing buttons on each page to reduce information overload and ensure an intuitive user experience.
High information density, simple to operate
The central design tension in this product was clear from the first stakeholder workshop: the underlying domain is information-dense (hundreds of products, several care contexts, evolving regulation, multiple price points), but the primary user is often an elderly person with limited digital experience, sometimes operating the product for the first time during a stressful caregiving moment. The product had to carry the complexity of the domain without exposing it to the user, and to do so within the constraints of accessibility standards (WCAG), which shape what is possible at the level of typography, contrast, touch targets, and interaction.
Several decisions follow from that tension. A structured needs assessment, with short, plain-language questions and a small filtering vocabulary, replaces the open product catalogue: the user describes a situation rather than searching for a product. Normalised product information, presented in a consistent format across vendors, makes products genuinely comparable instead of leaving the user to interpret each manufacturer's marketing language. A consultation path is one tap away whenever the user wants human help. Print is treated as a first-class output, not as an afterthought: saved products and shortlists can be printed and taken into offline conversations with family or a doctor, where most real care decisions are made. And across all of this, a deliberate restraint applies, one clear action per screen, minimal button count, no decorative complexity, so that someone using a digital product for the first time is never asked to choose between options that are not essential.
In active use, in continuous iteration
My Technik Finder is live and actively used by the Senatsverwaltung für Wissenschaft, Gesundheit und Pflege Berlin, and continues to be iterated on after the v1.0 release. For a public-sector product in the care domain, where adoption is slow and trust is hard to earn, this kind of continued use across versions is the most meaningful form of validation.
The accessibility direction was tested directly with the intended audience. The user-testing programme included elderly participants, the actual primary user group, not internal proxies. Recruiting and testing with this audience is materially harder than running tests with younger digital natives, and it is what gives the accessibility decisions, from the question structure to the print-friendly outputs, their evidential basis rather than designer intuition.
The main challenge of this project was ensuring a barrier-free design while catering to an older user demographic. The interface and operation process needed to be highly intuitive, simple, and easy to understand to accommodate users with limited digital experience.
