TSOlife builds resident engagement technology for senior living communities, and part of that is a library of games running on large touchscreen units in the common room. Residents play on their own, with staff, or with family who are visiting. I designed the interface for five of them: Bingo, Blackjack, Slots, Word Search and Rhythm.
The five deliberately don't share an art direction. Bingo is purple and confetti, Blackjack is green felt and wood, Slots is a gold cabinet, Word Search is pale blue and almost clinical, Rhythm is neon on near-black. Each one had to look like the thing it is, because a resident picks a game off a shelf of tiles and the picture is how they pick.
What all five do share is the skeleton underneath. Home sits in the top-left corner, Settings in the top-right, both as an icon with the word written underneath it. The actions that move the game forward sit in a single row along the bottom edge. Nothing important lives anywhere else. Learn where things are once and you've learned all five.
Every control is a labelled rectangle with an icon and the word for what it does, stacked. No gestures, no long presses, no swipe-to-reveal, and no icon left to carry a meaning on its own. If a button does something, it says so.
Scope
This was client work. The interface design across all five games is mine: layout, controls, type, colour, iconography, states and the shared navigation system. The platform itself, the game logic and the photographic textures sitting behind the Rhythm genre tiles came from TSOlife.
Designing for the room, not the phone
The unit is a large screen on a stand in a shared room. It gets played standing up, sometimes by someone with a tremor, cataracts or arthritis, often with a staff member or a grandchild reaching across to help. That rules out most of the habits you carry over from mobile work: small targets, thin type, low-contrast greys, anything that depends on remembering what a previous screen said.
So the targets are big enough to hit with a knuckle, the type is set large by default rather than offered as an accessibility toggle, and the state of the game is written out in words somewhere on screen at all times. Total Cash, Balance, Bet, Current Ball, the last five balls called. Nothing has to be held in the player's head between one tap and the next.
Colour never carries meaning on its own either. In Bingo the B, I, N, G and O letters are colour-coded to the five number columns, but the letter is always sitting right next to the colour, and a called number gets a ring around it as well as a fill. A resident with any form of colour blindness reads exactly the same board as everyone else.
Text Size and High Contrast then live inside the game's own settings screen, next to Sound and Auto Call, on one page with a Save & Close button. Not buried in a system menu nobody in the building is going to go looking for.
