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How one organization is paving the way for accessible home care
Before my journey into becoming a UX designer, I studied gerontology and worked in long term care. Being exposed in this environment provided valuable insight into the perspectives of a ‘caregiver’ and a ‘personal support worker’. One may ask, what is the difference? Aren’t they same? The short answer is no. Now before we dig deeper into these two perspectives, I’d like to take this opportunity to educate readers on this particular landscape.
At some point in our lives, we may become responsible for someone we care about. We may struggle with balancing our own lives while trying to ensure that the ones we are caring for are adequately supported. For some of us, we may endure mental stress, financial instability, foregoing our own needs or lose focus within our own career professions — because of caregiving responsibilities.
How do caregivers navigate and manage the overwhelming responsibilities that are set upon them? This is where many hire external professional help from Personal Support Workers (typically addressed as PSW) — these individuals specialize in home care aide. PSWs generally have a patient, warm and good natured demeanor. Much like caregivers, PSWs also face an abundance of challenges — from scheduling, maintaining/coordinating travel times, juggling various clients whom have special needs. PSWs must also manage care effectively while being cognizant of their client’ conditions.
The question is, how does one organization forge the path to creating a voice for PSWs and caregivers? How do they produce a platform that enables both sides to manage and overcome daily challenges they face?
Who is AYD Cares?
An organization that empowers caregivers and personal support workers the flexibility to manage care in a safe and convenient way. AYD Cares has access to the largest network of personal support workers in Ontario.
As promised, let’s take this moment to demystify the ‘definition’ of a caregiver and a personal support worker. You may have an idea of what that might be already, however, for the purpose of this case — here are it’s defintions.
Fast Facts
Imagine the impact of these facts. The aging population is not going away. We are facing a potential epidemic in providing accessible care to the massive aging cohort, also known as, ‘baby boomers’ — defined as those individuals born between 1946 and 1964.
By 2030 — in less than two decades — seniors will number over 9.5 million and make up 23 percent of Canadians. — Source: Government of Canada
Furthermore, there are not enough PSWs to support the increasing need of home care.
Our Plight
How do we arm our personal support workers and caregivers the necessary tools and resources to better serve their work-life balance?
The Plan
We provide a platform that offers resources, guidance and access to a community of individuals (personal support workers & caregivers) to help manage their daily responsibilities.
Due to the complexity of our client and the industry, we had to conduct extensive research for both caregiver and personal support worker. Our goal was to understand the current landscape. In addition, our mandate was to also drive other goals to supplement and complete our client’s overall vision.
Supplementary Project Goals
- Educate and Inform — providing a platform that offers resources and tools
- Connect — a space and place for caregivers and PSWs to communicate and unite
- Download the app — encourage users to learn more about the app our client has developed to help manage care
Super extensive research
Facts and stats that will offer insight on the day and the life of a caregiver and personal support worker.
My Role
It appears that my fortay is in synthesizing, dissecting and gathering research. I spent the majority of my time making correlations and drawing relationships between the data I found and the data our client shared. Thus, during this particular project, 70% of my time was dedicated towards qualifying the research, relieving any assumptions and supporting those that were critical to the project.
Research Deployment
- Ethnographic — based on 50 responses
- Online Survey — based on 50 responses
- Secondary Data (primarily due to limited caregiver responses)
Breaking it down — caregiver vs. personal support worker
As I mentioned earlier, we will separate perspectives and dissect the research to obtain a thorough understanding of its respective landscape.
Part I : Personal Support Worker Perspective
Importance of how personal support workers are using technology to connect with peers + clients
Since our client had emphasized the importance of encouraging users to download the app from his organization, we felt it was important to understand how they were connecting today in the current landscape.
Above we see how PSWs are currently connecting with caregivers. As well as the desired features which PSWs felt would benefit in managing their daily job responsibilities.
Consequently, 12% of our respondents (6/50) actually used a mobile app to schedule their work. This illustrates an untapped opportunity to increase the adoption of technology — download the client’s app.
Part II : Caregiver Perspective
We encountered a challenge during our deployment of the online survey towards caregivers. We did not receive any survey participants. We tried every outlet and channel — it was difficult to gain any insight. We resorted to looking for secondary research data sources. Luckily, we were able to extract very credible data from Statistics Canada — a resource that proved to be invaluable to our project.
The General Social Survey (GSS), is a Statistics Canada program made up of a series of independent, annual, cross-sectional surveys, each covering a specific topic in-depth.
The GSS survey was conducted in February 2012 covering the topics of caregiving and care receiving for a long-term health condition, disability or problem related to aging. The survey was conducted over the phone, with a care receiver and a caregiver.
Thought I’d bring this forward again to remind readers of the extensive research performed for both perspectives.
Secondary Data — Research Facts
Caregiver population segmentation — where are they?
We wanted to understand where most caregivers are populated within Ontario, the study shows that a vast majority (86%) reside in urban areas.
Why was this important? Our client offers a service that connects caregivers to personal support workers — providing home care. If we understand where caregivers are, then our client can market his service accordingly.
How much time do they spend travelling?
Caregivers spend a bulk of their time travelling. This could range from medical appointments/treatments, pick up/drop off their loved ones to care facilities, among other tasks.
Key insights
- 50% of caregivers travel less than an hour by car
- 20% of caregivers travel more than hour by car
- 30% of caregivers have someone they care for at home
Caregiver Responsibilities — what they face on a daily basis
Within the secondary research data and our client’, we also found that 40% of caregivers reported that they take care of both scheduling and coordinating appointments.
This piece of our research is highlighted here because it is essentially the ‘crux’ of our client’ overall product vision.
Below are additional caregiver responsibilities which were also reported.
Managing a Work Life Balance
Part of the Statistics Canada social survey, we found that managing a work life balance was a significant challenge for many caregivers. They struggle with balancing their responsibilities while working.
We’ve wrapped up all the research. Phew. Now we can start building our personas.
Personas
Here is what we built from the research. We came up with four personas. You’ll see that they are primarily female since that is the leading demographic.
These four personas encompass all of the research we deployed and studied. The stories depicted above in quotations provide a window into who our users would be.
Design Foundations
We begin drafting, sketching, thinking and sorting out the numerous ideas, assumptions and thoughts we had for our client, AYD Cares. We also had to continue to be cognizant of the mission and vision our client had.
Designing for a responsive experience — web + mobile
Lo-Fidelities (LO-FI) + Mid-Fidelities (MID-FI) + Prototype
As part of our client project, it was our responsibility to create a responsive platform for both web and mobile.
Responsive web — mid fidelity
Responsive mobile — mid fidelity
Testing, testing, testing, 1, 2, 3…
The last stop to validating all of our hard work! We conducted user testing on a number of participants. We measured our success with the following metrics:
- Complete tasks correctly and easily
- The language and the terms used are familiar to the user
- The user can easily tell where to find what they want or need
- Consistency of navigation and CTAs
- Straight forward/easy to follow visual information hierarchy
User insights and feedback
- Users were able to complete the task
- Most people said the site and mobile application was easy to navigate
- Some found there was too much text on the home page if the site and that the site was very information heavy
- Redundant information
- We decided to reduce some text on this page to interesting stats
The above example is one where the user felt that adding an FAQ would be valuable to the user in the side bar menu. It was only found in the footer of the site. Now it is located in two separate locations — footer and side bar menu.
Final Prototype — Responsive Web + Mobile
The responsive mobile version is condensed to observe the size and accessibility of a mobile device. We primarily stacked all of the elements within the mobile version, as well as, removed some of the more ‘rich’ information from the web version to the mobile version.
The last word…
I had spent so much time researching that I did not get a chance actually configure the interactions within ADOBE XD. I did, however, sketch, create mid-fis and build the final presentation for our client.
Building a presentation with all the comprehensive research we found was a challenge in itself. How do we effectively present all of this material and not lose ourselves during the presentation? I managed to do the best that I could in creating a presentation that spoke to our client, while respecting the overall design process.
While I love design and many of us do — we look forward to drawing, sketching and creating. However, some of us forget that how we present our research effectively to others is critical to how we ultimately design. You can definitely get lost in research — I was afraid that I would forget bits of information which I deemed was ‘important’. In the end, I had to remind myself not to get off course — don’t forget what the goals are.
Remember to go back to your client’s mission, goals and vision; this will keep you grounded and in check. It will also help you and your team to stay focused.
One more thing…
Thank you AYD Cares, for bridging the relationship between caregivers and personal support workers. This is one step to forging a successful future of hope and support for everyone who might one day need your help. If you’re someone or know someone who may benefit, look them up!
