Coordicare
Role : UX Researcher, Product Designer
Timeline : 9 weeks, Feb - May 2021
Tools : Figma & Mirror, Invision, Sketch, Photoshop, Google Slide
A caregiving application that connects families around the care of their senior loved ones who live alone.
It allows caregivers to coordinate their visit schedules and share important updates faster. They could also monitor the wellness and safety of their elders within the app.
The Story
In today’s mobile society, children move away from their hometown because of opportunities, such as work, marriage, education, etc. From my personal experience, my mother who is in her seventies lives by herself in Jakarta, while her daughters all live in different parts of the world.
Many others in my circle of family and friends face the same challenge of staying informed about the needs of our senior parents from a distance and making sure they get the care they need.
It is a sensitive matter, with discussion usually postponed until there is an absolute emergency.
The COVID-19 pandemic has not been great for our collective mental health, and caregivers and their loved ones are unquestionably suffering. 62% of family caregivers said their senior loved ones have suffered physically or mentally because of isolation.
The Problem
Most Affected Demographics
Distance caregivers - this term refers to caregivers who live an hour or more away from a person who needs care.
The GenXers (35-58 years old), the middle-aged adults who provide care for a senior parent who lives alone.
“How might we help distance caregivers take care of their senior loved ones by monitoring and coordinating care, in order to reduce caregivers' burnout while ensuring their loved ones are looked after?”
The Process
Using Design Thinking methodology, its non-linear process helped me gain new insights on different steps, iterate quickly, and develop a far more profound understanding of the users’ problem.
This compelling project was an end-to-end UX design process experience from research, idea explorations, user testing, developing brand and mobile app interfaces.
The Research
User Interview Insights
From the interviews, I found out that the caregivers’ pain points around the feeling of lack of control and needing more support were being discussed more than any other issues.
Key Takeaways
After analyzing the research from relevant articles and user interviews data, I pulled out some key insights that could be divided into two common shared themes:
Care coordination was selected as the primary theme, so caregivers could get more support from siblings in order to feel less burnout.
This finding was aligned with the study that reported that 26% of family caregivers have difficulty coordinating care (The National Alliance for Caregiving (NAC) and AARP)Safety & wellness as the secondary theme, caregivers want to make sure their senior parents are well-taken care of. My idea has a potential solution pairing up with some wearable device for a monitoring tool that could pull seniors’ vitals data and location.
Connecting the Dots
After synthesizing data from the interviews and the literature research, I brought all together and developed my persona. To help aligned my design process, I narrowed down the persona’s pain points and goals. Then I mapped the user’s experience to identify moments of opportunities for intervention.
To create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), I focused on the primary theme (Care Coordination).
The tasks were broken down into two flows: plan a visit and share update post-visit.
Building the Prototype
After the sketching and wireframing process, the best ideas was selected and it was time to start building.
The core task flow was for caregivers to coordinate care by scheduling a visit from the Calendar, and share update post-visit from the Journal page.
Below was my mid-fi grayscale prototype and it was ready to be tested for its usability.
The Usability Testing
Testers were asked to complete the core task flow, while they were navigating through the prototype, I observed how real users interacted with the app. I learned that testing with real users proven to be the best way to improve usability and pivot quickly if there are any issues.
2
Rounds of Testing
10
User Testers
3
Iterations
The first round was done with UX students to get all the functions usable first. Feedback gathered was around structure, design, and navigation.
The second round was done with target users. The feedback was mostly minor, concerning wording and adding necessary features. It’s easy to get lost when trying to get all the features usable first, but it’s important to still meet the users’ needs.
Testing Highlights
The most notable feedback from the users were to add two features, the ability to save the journal and the request support feature for the app’s scalability. If an external caregiver is needed, they need a platform to invite, request support and access previous records easily.
The Accessibility Consideration
Designing for older demographic
I did some research before designing the interface because I remember after turning 40, my sisters need to adjust the font to be bigger on their iPhones. I want to keep in mind to put the user in the center when designing a product for them.
Starting from the age of 40, the common issue is eyesight as vision flexibility is decreasing
Font size must be large, body copy should be 17pt, label copy at the smallest on 13pt
Large button size, or at least to keep by minimum 44pt height, based on IOS guideline
Using text for labels along with icons, as informative as possible as they might not be too familiar if only using the icons
Web color contrast recommended ratio must be kept at least 4.5:1, according to WCAG (AA)
Proxima Nova was recommended on one of the sans-serif font types to use as best practice when writing for the web
The Visualization
Branding
Quite a few branding names were explored, I searched for a unique name and decided on Coordicare, from “Care coordination”. For caregivers, showing that they care for their loved ones is by checking on them regularly and getting things done for them.
Inspiration & Colors
Keywords that inspires the personality of the brand
Nostalgic, Calm, Sentimental, Comforting, Coordinated, Optimistic, Connected, Positivity
Using these keywords, I collected relevant images to develop the visual language of the brand. It was the most fun and familiar creative process for me as a designer.
The colors were chosen for their meanings, the teal green represents the color of “nature and health”, and the blue color represents “loyalty, strength, wisdom, and trust”. The color combination creates a calming effect for the users that might be using the app in a distress or burnout state.
Typography
Poppins is a playful rounded sans serif font that gives a lively feel to the mobile application. it is used for Headings and CTAs.
Proxima Nova was selected because of its legibility for body copies and labels, which also balances well when pairing with Poppins.
Iconography & UI library
I created a comprehensive UI library as a guide for clients, designers or to be handed off to the dev team based on Brad’s Frost Atomic design system.
The High Fidelity
Reiterate, reiterate, reiterate
After the branding, typography, and brand colors were ready, it was time to add the personality into the app and come to life as a real product.
But then I learned that even after getting ready for high fidelity, I still received feedback that the interaction for my prototype could be improved on the calendar and the support page need to be laid out more effectively. I quickly reiterated just in time for the submission deadline.
Before: User control issue, users need to click “skip” if they don’t need to set a reminder
After: Now they don’t have to go through all processes, they could select only what they want to set then click “save” to go to the next task. This removes unnecessary clicks and gives users more control.
Onboarding flow
The Final Design
The video walkthrough of Coordicare
SUPPORTING CHANNEL
Marketing Site
As the first point of entry to the app, I want to make sure that the landing page will give enough information about the brand, product core value propositions, and gives a clear click-to action to the target users.
I developed illustrative storytelling for the brand story based on Patrick the persona, to increase user engagement and create a more personalized feeling.
Testimonial videos were carefully selected from real user stories within the demographic to add trust and social proof.
Apple Watch
Apple Watch is the perfect alternate platform of choice for Coordicare. During the pandemic, according to the research, tech use among the 50+ increased particularly in wearable devices – from 17% to 27%.
The best use case is for sharing important updates faster and alerting if there was something unusual regarding seniors’ vitals data.
FUTURE & REFLECTIVE
Measurement of success
After shipped, Coordicare will need to be measure by certain KPIs.
Monetization, as a Freemium caregiving app that offers free basic features, and offers paid service on premium features such as the ability to get more in-depth insights on the seniors’ vitals data, and the ability to get more storage on saved data on the journal. Then the percentage of users upgrade versus using a free or basic version should be measured.
Improve the number of downloads, users retention rate, and average time per session
Promote users satisfaction on blogs, and collects feedback from the app reviews, ratings, and Net Promotor Score (NPS)
Collaboration with the seniors and their community, as there is a real potential for the app to be used involving the seniors, during the pandemic 4 out of 5 older adults age 50+ rely on technology to stay connected and in touch with family and friends, and the smartphone adoption has jumped to 77 percent among them.
Key Learnings
Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that could happen at each stage. Sometimes I have to go backward to move forward.
Trust myself and the process. How many times I felt so overwhelmed but I surprised myself every time that I could finish just by following the process and ask a lot of feedback
The key to success in UX is to never rely on my own assumptions, user tests them, get feedback often, continue to explore, and iterates.