Zinnia All Day — Reid Alexander

Overview

Zinnia All Day is a capstone project created with Zinnia TV, a platform that offers dementia-friendly video content. Our team explored how scheduling could make that content more useful in everyday care by helping caregivers plan around routines, challenging transition periods, and changing needs throughout the day.

Rather than adding more complexity, we aimed to design a system that feels supportive and low effort. The result was a scheduling concept that lets caregivers organize content by time of day, prepare ahead, and make quick adjustments when routines change.

Context

Caregivers supporting people living with dementia often deal with stress, burnout, and cognitive overload. Routine can make a meaningful difference, but building and maintaining that routine takes time and energy many caregivers do not have.

Zinnia already offers thoughtful, dementia-friendly content. The gap we focused on was not the content itself, but how caregivers could organize, plan, and reuse it in a way that fits their life.

On the current Zinnia platform, caregivers cannot...

Organize content around time-of-day routines
Customize schedules to support specific care needs
Build and schedule custom playlists

A key idea that shaped the project

“The most valuable button is not the play button, it is the pause button. That is the moment to pause and connect over the content being shared on the screen, prompting conversation between the caregiver and the person they support.ˮ — Bill Uniowski, Zinnia Founder

My Role

I serve as a UX Designer & Researcher, with my biggest contributions in research, synthesis, and building the overall UX direction.

Built the caregiver survey and shaped the research questions
Synthesized findings into design insights the team could act on
Created user personas and key interaction decisions
Helped translate research into wireframes

Team Contribution

As a team, we worked across research, strategy, and prototyping to define the problem space and turn it into a usable concept.

Conducted survey research, interviews, and literature review
Defined personas across different caregiving situations
Validated key concepts with users and sponsor feedback
Built and refined a Figma prototype for the MVP presentation

Survey Insights

I created the caregiver survey to better understand routines, stressful parts of the day, preferred levels of control, and what kinds of content caregivers actually use.

Survey slide showing that evenings and transition periods were the most challenging times

Late-day and transition periods came up most often as the hardest parts of the day.

Survey slide showing caregivers preferred suggestions with the ability to adjust

Caregivers wanted guided control, not a fully manual or fully automatic system.

Key Takeaways from the Survey

Late-day is hardest: Evenings and transitions were the most overwhelming times for many caregivers.
Caregivers want guided control: Adjustable suggestions were preferred over full automation or total manual setup.
Routines are not universal: Caregiving requires structure, but also flexibility and customization.
Media serves a purpose beyond entertainment: It can calm, distract, spark conversation, and support rest or chores.

Personas

I turned the research into personas to capture distinct caregiving situations and keep the product grounded in real use cases. These specific sponsors were requested by our sponsor: One caregiver of a spouse and one caregiver of a parent in another state.

Melissa represents a caregiver who needs low-effort structure and less day-to-day decision fatigue.

Matthew represents a remote caregiver who wants more visibility and routine support from afar.

Design Direction

The design centered on one idea: scheduling should reduce effort, not create another task. We focused on features that match how caregivers already think about the day, while keeping the interaction model simple enough to feel approachable.

1. Structured Daily Scheduling

Organize content into morning, afternoon, and evening routines to support predictability.

2. Pre-Planned Programming

Let caregivers build ahead so they are not constantly deciding what to play in the moment.

3. Connection, Not Just Consumption

The tool should support meaningful interaction around content, not replace human care.

Solution

We designed a drag-and-drop scheduling interface that lets caregivers build routines using curated content, playlists, and reusable content blocks. The goal was to make planning faster while still leaving room for quick changes.

The scheduling interface combines a timeline view with genre browsing, playlists, and reusable content blocks.

Key Features

Drag-and-drop scheduling across a weekly timeline
Content grouped in a way that supports routine-based planning
Reusable playlists for faster setup
Simple options to start from scratch, watch now, or add to playlist

Next Steps for Spring Quarter

Expand current wireframes into a fully usable prototype platform
Implement back-end for scheduling system
Test via usability testing and iterate upon feedback