Arthur Bretschneider is CEO and Co-Founder of Seniorly and a third-gen leader in the space, advocating to improve the lives of older adults.
Growing up in San Francisco, it’s easy to fall in love with houses. As a kid walking home from school, I’d look up at the row houses crowning our hills or dream about living in one of the Victorian gems hiding in our nooks and crannies. It’s kind of a magical place, this City by the Bay.
So when Silicon Valley had a “meet-cute” with the housing market, I was all in. Housing marketplaces like Zillow and Airbnb pioneered a digital transformation of their categories and provided endless inspiration for me as CEO. As a third-generation senior living operator, I knew exactly how absent technology was from the vertical. Not only had I seen firsthand how broken the search for senior living was, but I also saw how easily it could be addressed through marketplace transformation.
In fact, the entire concept for my current company was creating the kind of marketplace that Zillow and Airbnb introduced, which simply didn’t exist for senior living. There are three important lessons from these innovators I’ve learned that I believe other senior living leaders can keep in mind to improve the experience for older adults and their families.
1. Democratize data.
Access to trusted data, along with expert guidance on how to interpret it, is a key pillar in our approach. When Zillow introduced the Zestimate, data that had previously been difficult to access and monitor was suddenly front and center in the evaluation process. Homebuyers could now draw their own conclusions about the value of a home through engaging with data.
As older adults live longer and extended family is often not geographically nearby, decisions about senior living investment become more important than ever. And the sad fact is that I’ve found ageist stereotypes have influenced the vertical’s commitment to technology. For those of us in technology-forward senior living categories, we have a responsibility to transform data into something so useful and so exciting that it delights and engages families.
Yet, in the age of information, it’s surprisingly difficult for families to process data about senior living communities. From pricing to licensing, neighborhood scores to ratings and reviews, there’s endless data available that is hard to collate and even harder to process. Companies developing tech for the senior living industry need to remember that they have a responsibility to not only consolidate data for families but also make it so easy to understand that they can actually take action on it.
2. The customer (experience) is king.
From my perspective, platforms like Airbnb and Realtor understood the importance of the customer experience early on. Functions like saved searches, property recommendations, stakeholder collaboration and advanced filtering options ushered in a new era of simplified search. But, designing the customer experience often goes beyond simply considering the paying customer. It means understanding the sometimes complex web of stakeholders involved in the decision process.
In senior living, the stakeholders comprise not just them but also their adult Gen-X children. And while much attention has been given to the way older generations will transform the resident experience, we have all but forgotten the impact Gen-X will have on the starting point of the search.
When designing any new product feature, those in the senior living space have to critically evaluate how it will be used by both Gen-X and their parents, two different audiences with different expectations for digital features. While the seniors might opt to collaborate through synchronous communication via phone or text, the Gen-X persona might prefer asynchronous communication via an app or platform. Thinking about the customer in the wider context of the full decision process is a lesson my own company borrowed from real estate marketplaces and has been so helpful in designing for the future.
3. Design is the feature and the benefit.
I pay a lot of attention to the way Airbnb uses design strategically to help its users. In the early days, I perceived the company’s vision and mission as seamlessly integrated into its design language with casual, inviting tones and helpful iconography. As time went on, it appeared to leverage data to inform design decisions. From filter and review presentation to the addition of a “superhost” feature, everything Airbnb does from a design perspective seems to be highly intentional and data-driven.
Designing a senior living marketplace presents several obstacles that will likely take several years and industry collaboration to overcome. The first is that senior living tends to carry a negative emotional charge, often serving as a reminder of the aging experience. The second is that the quality of care is often opaque; most families don’t fully know how to properly assess the quality of care in senior living.
These challenges force senior housing stakeholders to adopt a design framework that delivers two key things that we learned from Airbnb in our experience trying to do the same: First, the use of design principles to reflect your mission of changing the industry narrative is imperative to actually trigger real change; second, prominent presentation of the right kind of data plays a key role in supporting families to make better-informed decisions. In my experience, data design is an iterative process. It might take several times to get it right, but when you do, I’ve seen that businesses can experience increased engagement.
Take cues for your inspiration.
Taking cues from disruptive platforms has allowed my team to embrace data-driven decision making, invest in understanding the myriad personas influencing the decision process and strategically use design to extend our mission and build our business. The final lesson? There’s inspiration everywhere. You just have to look around.
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