Case Study

CareTeam

Designing for family caregivers to share and delegate tasks

Overview

Tools
Figma
Miro
UserTesting
Team
Anushka Jain
Praveen Bhardwaj
Yuqing Wu
Client
HealthTech Giant
Duration
4 months

Contributions
While I was actively involved throughout the project, my unique contribution involved taking a lead on defining the research questions, creating interview protocols, conducting competitive analysis, defining and prototyping two of the main features, writing the unique value propositions, writing the storyboard and presenting the final product demo.

Client Objectives

1 out of 5 Americans is a primary caregiver.

As part of Purdue Corporate Consulting, our clients tasked us with the challenge of designing a platform for family caregivers to delegate tasks and create a sense of connectedness.

What We Did

  • Research to define user needs
  • Design of a functional prototype
  • Testing to improve design and accessibility and create recommendations for future product iterations
  • Research to understand market competitors and identify opportunities for building unique value propositions
  • Product demo and pitch to company executives

Challenge

Caregivers find it challenging to juggle between multiple responsibilities and seek help from others in their family which adversely impacts their health.
23.7 hours per week spent on caregiving, sometimes even 40+ hours
23% caregivers left their job to take care of caregiving responsibilities
3 of 5 caregivers reported poor physical or mental health due to caregiving stress
Looking at studies on family caregivers such as that done by AARP and Mckinsey led us to our problem statement
How might we make task sharing and coordination easier for the family and help them build connection and companionship with their loved ones?​

Customer Insights

From interviewing 6 primary caregivers we learned that primary caregivers are often hesitant in asking for help because:
  • Not sure of others ability, availability and willingness to help
  • Only one with all the information which is difficult to communicate
  • Feel a sense of embarrassment in asking for help

However primary caregivers are not the only user group, understanding those who help them is equally important and interviewing 4 secondary caregivers, we learnt that they want to help but are not sure how to because:
  • Difficult to know how caregiving tasks would fit into their schedule
  • Being distant, it is hard to find ways to care and support
  • With a busy lifestyle it is easy to forget to checkin or offer help

Competitive Analysis

Looking at existing applications for task delegation and those specific to caregivers, I found several commonalities and also gaps that presented new opportunity areas:
  • Similarities: A lot of apps had common features like adding journal entries, recording symptoms, creating and assigning to-dos, saving notes and documents
  • Opportunity areas: Most of these apps lacked integration between different features such as tasks, notes and calendars and were not optimized for a mobile first experience
Competitive Analysis Mapping in Miro

Identifying Design Opportunities

After conducting affinity analysis on the research findings many themes were identified which were used to to aid in creating a needs list and 'how might we questions' to guide ideation
Affinity Analysis Mapping in Miro
Four main design opportunities were identified

1

How might we make it efficient for caregivers to delegate tasks and helpers to choose tasks?

2

How might we help caregivers share relevant information with helpers who want to help out with tasks?

3

How might we encourage emotional bonding within the care network?

4

How might we facilitate communication within the care network without hesitation?

Prioritizing Ideas

As we ideated and conducted some initial concept testing with 10 users, we defined criteria to help us prioritize:
  • Reduce the amount of work done by caregiver and not add to it
  • Be scalable and flexible for different caregiving situations
  • Motivate use over prolonged period of time
Primary and Secondary Caregiver Wireframes Information Architectures
We also found several important insights through initial testing
  • There should be a balance between manually creating and delegating tasks and including automation
  • Physical objects such as sticky notes, diaries can be used as inspiration to create a sense of familiarity
  • There should be a sense of ownership and accountability
  • The application should be designed as mobile-first

Rapid Prototyping and Testing

We decided to focus on designing a mobile first app with three main features
  • Calendar to view tasks, events and schedules
  • Task dashboard to create, view and assign tasks
  • Chat bot to assist in assigning tasks and setting reminders

Iterating through several rounds of prototyping and doing a mix of concept, usability and A/B testing with 10-20 users we were able to gain several insights on the various features.

Shared Calendar

  • Users found it assuring to be able to see availability when creating tasks
  • The sticky note design although created a sense of familiarity was not accessible to many
  • Users had  concerns around privacy and visibility of personal events to others in the family
Different views of calendar

Task Dashboard

  • Users wanted to get a sense of important tasks through a quick glance without much scrolling
  • Users preferred categorizing tasks according to importance rather than categories
  • Notes for repetitive tasks should be easy to save to avoid repetition
A/B testing two versions of task dashboard

Chat

  • Primary and Secondary caregivers had different preferences while the later felt uncomfortable being pinged by a bot to take up a task, the former appreciated the help
  • Reminders about some things seemed condescending and pushy
  • Mediating conversations in family group chats could create more problems
Example of chat bot functionality
After several rounds of prototyping and testing
  • Many existing features such as task dashboard were refined to improve accessibility
  • User flows between existing features such as calendar and chat was improved to increase ease of use
  • Some new features such as 'Notebooks' were added to breakdown the functionality and complexity of existing features

Final Design and Storyboard

To present our final design to the company executives, we storyboarded using the Thompson family to demonstrate how our design would help caregivers and their family
Primary Caregiver & Helper Onboarding Experience

Onboarding for Ease

Sarah can quickly create a team, add the care recipients illness to customize their experience, add things they need help with and invite their family.
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Emily and Lucas can easily join and indicate their distance from the care recipient, select what they can help with most and sync their own calendar.

Notebooks for Efficiency

Sarah is able to create notebooks for storing and organizing information about different tasks. The app also creates customs notebooks with helpful information based on the recipients indicated illness.
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Sarah is able to indicate the privacy of the notes and share with select few people.

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Primary Caregiver Notebooks View
Primary Caregiver task dashboard and Calendar View
Helper Task dashboard View

Task Dashboard & Calendar Interoperability for Optimization

Sarah is able to quickly create tasks, attach notes and control privacy of shared tasks. With help from the Carebot, she is also able to set reminders for her family to check in with mom.

Sarah is also able to view her family's availability while creating tasks and assign them. Incase she feels uncomfortable assigning tasks, she is also able to share tasks in chat with her family to ask for urgent help.

Secondary caregivers like Emily are also able to easily view and take up tasks, ask questions and view information.

Care bot & Family Wall for Assistance and Connectivity

The carebot assists Sarah by helping her find volunteers when needed and helps remind Emily to check in with her mom.

At the end of the day, the family can come together to share their favorite memories on the family wall and help family members like Lucas who live far away to feel a sense of connection with the rest of the family.
Carebot Assisting with Finding Help
Family Wall

Unique Value Proposition

Going back to our research, design opportunities and goals for the project, I was able to identify the unique value created by CareTeam that set it apart from other similar products.
Allow the caregivers to share tasks with their family while taking emotions into consideration
Combining effectiveness of a task management tool and the connectedness of a community platform 

Reflection

I loved the experience working on a consulting project end to end from research to design and was able to learn a lot.
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Personally I got the chance to lead a lot of the research parts of the project and also learn prototyping in Figma with the help of my colleagues.

A few things I learned the are important when designing for such a family situation are
  • Tech adaptability and accessibility - it is very important to keep in mind the age group you are designing for and their comfort level with technology. We went through several levels of iteration and had to discard a lot of our initial ideas.
  • Family complexity - as designers it is important to be vary of not causing disruption in existing dynamics. Families can be complex and it is very important to test with all user groups because what works for some might not work for others and end up creating problems than solving them.
  • Empowering care recipients - While we were not able to address this in our design, we realized that in many cases, care recipients are also involved in their care especially early on. There is a lot of opportunity for future designs to explore this space and build products that empower care recipients to set up their own care system and ask their family for help.

If you are looking for help or have opportunities you would like to discuss, Let's Talk!