What

Learn how people with balance and stability challenges, and the caregivers who help them, get in and out of cars, and what would make them trust a product built for it — for a startup that had nothing to show us yet.

Context

Cargility, a Michigan startup, was building a product to help people with balance and stability challenges get in and out of vehicles, and could not yet show it to anyone. In SI 311, our team of five UX researchers ran 30 semi-structured interviews of about 20 minutes each, over Zoom and in person, with two groups: people who struggle with vehicle entry and exit themselves, and the family members and professionals who help them. Participants came through a screener with written inclusion and exclusion criteria. Questions asked about behavior rather than opinion, and branched on whether someone had used a solution, looked without buying, or never looked. We pulled out every quote by participant, coded each group's quotes into themes, built two personas and two journey maps from them, and presented our recommendations to Cargility.

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The recruitment flyer, then every quote coded by theme: people with stability challenges, and caregivers

Constraints

1. No product to test. Cargility had nothing it could show us, so we studied the problem — the transfer itself, and how people find and choose aids — rather than a design.
2. Participants who are hard to reach. Our first round was all caregivers, PT clinics and senior centers rarely replied, and our own networks skewed young. NextDoor posts reached older adults across Ann Arbor, and we tightened the screener after one participant’s difficulty turned out to be cognitive rather than physical.
3. Twenty minutes a conversation. Every question had to earn its place, so the guide changed between rounds: we added walk-throughs of what people actually hold onto, and cut questions that proved redundant or did not sound conversational.
4. Second-hand accounts. Some caregivers described what they assumed the person felt rather than what they had seen, so we weighed stated needs against described behavior before calling anything a finding.

Key Findings

1. Getting out is the hard part

   Exit was harder than entry: lifting each leg out of a deep footwell, then standing with nothing solid to push against — worse in a garage, where the door cannot open fully.

2. The car is the handrail, and a poor one

   People brace on the door, the frame, the seat back or a headrest. The door swings, and assist handles have moved forward, away from where a hand reaches when getting in.

3. No two cars agree

   Seat height, footwell depth and handle placement change from car to car, so caregivers choose vehicles by height, and a tool that fits one car fails in the next.

4. Aids lose to seconds and pounds

   A walker too clumsy to load stays home; a caregiver who can lift 15 pounds cannot lift 60. If a tool takes longer to set up than the transfer it saves, it is abandoned.

5. Nobody knows the products exist

   Many had never searched for a solution. Those who had found generic “as seen on TV” gadgets they could not test before buying, and some broke in use.

6. Dignity decides adoption

   Nearly every interview surfaced resistance to looking frail or disabled in public. A device that reads as medical goes unused, however well it works.

Final Deliverable

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Cargility’s product, launched after the study (opens in a new tab) ↗

Reflection

We recommended that Cargility seek medical endorsement, lead with real users’ testimonials and tutorial videos, and frame the product around independence rather than disability. Cargility has since launched a portable, foldable vehicle handrail that fits most cars without modification, is rated to 300 pounds, is “validated by real users with balance challenges”, and is sold to keep people “moving on your terms.” We never saw the product and Cargility has not credited our research, but its claims answer, almost point for point, what our participants told us.

The interview guide is what I learned to design. The questions that worked did not ask how people felt about getting out of a car; they asked them to walk us through the last time, and what their hand was on. Behavior gave us findings a product could act on — the footwell, the swinging door — where opinion gave us adjectives.

What I would do differently is reach the people who struggle most from the first week. Our first round was all caregivers, and the older adults who most need this came late, through NextDoor. Setting up physical visits with senior centers and PT offices right from the start, rather than emailing them with general inquiries, would have put those voices at the center of the study early on instead of at the end.