Introduction
Caretakers make some of the lowest salaries in all of the job market yet provide invaluable services to society. With a rapidly aging population and more and more seniors opting out of hospices and retirement homes, the demand for caretakers is higher than ever. However, caretakers are not given the resources that they need to flourish in their profession. Many caretakers suffer from unsafe work conditions, stress and burnout. In fact, Caretaker Stress Syndrome is a condition characterized by physical, mental and emotional exhaustion where a person subverts their own needs in order to take care of someone who is ill, elderly, injured or disabled.
Coach aims to give caretakers the support and appreciation that they desperately need, especially with the advent of the coronavirus pandemic.
Who is it for?
Coach is for caretakers and the companies that employ them. Nursing homes are also involved in the process as well and can use Coach to recruit caretakers.
Objectives
I focused on the staff side of Coach, particularly the main dashboard and adding new clients and caretakers. Essentially, we wanted to make using Coach as simple and straightforward as possible. Gone are the days where employees have to go to specialized classes to learn how to use a company’s scheduling and recruitment software. With Coach, anyone can sit down and learn how to use it within minutes.
Research
For research, I watched a demo of ClearCare, one of the competitors in the caretaker industry. Throughout this demo, client Hui, Coach’s founder, interviewed Robyn, a scheduling manager. I went ahead and took notes about the demo and interview, particularly what features to include in Coach and where improvements could be made in existing competitors. Here were my findings:
The website’s UI is extremely unappealing.
Suggestion: A complete UI overhaul. Something that’s professional yet sleek and visually appealing. I can link potential points of inspiration. For one, the header sections (caregivers, applicants, payroll, etc) could be regulated to a sidebar complete with icons.
Need for additional information about applicant status. For example, it should show whether or not an applicant was interviewed, screened and whether or not they were hired.
Suggestion: Perhaps the applicant status could be further expanded to include ALL of the applicant’s statuses.
There’s currently no way to run a “poll” of all the potential applicants to see how many fit a certain status. Plus, the schedulers and the hiring managers are essentially “one in the same”; they all need to know the status of every potential applicant.
Suggestion: When applicants are filtered, perhaps there could be a tally at the top of the page that tells how many applicants fit that potential search option.
No one used the Employment Screening through Checkr. Instead, hiring managers ran background checks through another organization.
Suggestion: Delete the option to do employment screening through Checkr.
The software needs some sort of way to link up with existing payroll companies such as ADP.
Account users should be able to make their own notes about the applicants.
Suggestion: Add a note section to the applicant search page and the individual applicant pages. On the applicant search page, it should be its own particular section.
No way to quickly see if an applicant met basic skills and qualifications. Also, there is no way to filter applicants based on skills, qualifications and “quality”.
Suggestion: Give an ability to filter applicants by skills and qualifications.
Currently, schedulers have to contact caregivers and ask them about their shifts. This can make it difficult to track progress among individuals and in the entire company.
Suggestion: An automated survey given to caregivers where they can rate their shift and give any relevant notes. Also, there should be a section completely dedicated to recent shifts completed and any notes related to them.
Not every single suggestion was implemented, but this research gave me a decent foundation to work from. After research, I discussed with the client the direction he wanted to take with the initial designs and then got to work.
Wireframes
After our first calls, I went ahead and began working on low-fidelity mockups of the website’s dashboard and the client sign-up process. At first, I was uncertain how to make the sign-up process, but I decided to mockup the dashboards first.
The client provided sketches for how he envisioned the scheduling process after request.
With these as a guide, I made several wireframes in hopes of bringing the client’s sketches to life.
However, the client had some concerns about my designs. For one, he felt that the UI was too simplistic, and he wanted something more “modern”. For example, he started referencing other companies and their products such as Laudio and Gusto. He understood that he stressed that he wants Coach to be simple enough to where anyone can immediately jump in and use it, but he also did not want the overall product to look simple. My challenge now was to make a simple, easy-to-use product without that simplicity bleeding into the UI.
Redesign
I decided to draw inspiration from several industry competitors such as Laudio, Gusto and Lattice. Ideally, there would be a news feed that lets the user see all recent activity among all team members and caretakers, a selection of actions at the top, a search bar and an activity tracker that tracks the team’s total actions and how close the team is to their goal.
Considering the client’s feedback, I went ahead and tried making adjustments to my original designs of the shift filling process.
However, I needed to adjust my designs once again. The client wanted the sign-up process for both clients and caretakers to be like taking a survey where questions are presented one at a time. I wondered how we could present technical questions in a survey format without being too cumbersome to use. Back to the design board I went!
These iterations aligned more with the client’s expectations while still meeting user needs. It exemplifies the client’s desire for the product to lead the user every step of the way. By presenting only one question at a time, the user is never overwhelmed with information and can go through the client and caretaker registration process in a structured fashion. Plus, the break away from the typical bland and “technical” user interfaces present in existing competitors makes the entire product feel more welcoming and personable. Finally, the sign-up process gets all of the information that the staff needs without it being too difficult to use, especially for newer staff members.