Our client approached us with one primary objective — to create an innovative product that would aid seniors in continuing to live in their homes. Our challenge was to understand the needs of our target audience to help the business be a more fully-equipped provider for its customers.
I was tasked with creating an innovative, frictionless digital solution that addresses the growing senior population and rising costs associated with senior healthcare for CVS Health. CVS Health is looking into digital solutions to improve long-term caregiving options for senior citizens and allow them to live safely in their homes and maintain their independence.
I was the lead user interface designer. My main responsibility was the product design, creating major deliverables such as wire flows, wireframes, and visual mockups through Sketch, and prototyped on InVision. I worked with a junior UX Researcher who focused on market research and another UX Designer.
Before diving into features or ideas, our team stressed the importance of having a holistic approach to understanding the caregiving field and different user groups.
To specify an advantageous role for the app, we needed to identify the various avenues that currently constitute caregiving, what tools seniors relied on while living independently, and their experience of living at home with varied degrees of independence and caregivers’ experience caring for them. Our team decided to cast a wide net and conduct informal interviews on anyone involved in caregiving. We then synthesized our findings and created affinity diagrams to analyze the research.
We adopted a Lean UX approach and practiced sketching, rapid prototyping, user feedback, and mockups to keep the user at the center of our process.
During our research phase, we conducted market research, user interviews, and synthesized the data to define project milestones. We created several archetypes, but prioritized the in-home family caregiver to help ensure that all our design decisions were user-centered.
Our research revealed that a seniors’ ability to live independently was directly tied to whether or not they have some type of caregiver. Of the caregivers we talked to, none struggled with collecting medical data - monitoring physical health like blood sugar, vitals, etc. The type of hardships that unpaid caregivers dealt with were all emotional and often felt over-burdened when caring for the senior, while balancing the demands of their own lives.
Behind the user's frustrations lay a core problem. Caregivers encountered the biggest hurdles during times where they couldn't balance the demands of their own lives. They often felt alone and burdened by having to care for their elderly loved ones. Caregivers want to receive help, but find it difficult to share the burden if they aren't confident that people are willing to help.
Given the crucial role of the caregiver, and based on our understanding of the senior user group, we decided to pivot our design approach to focus on creating a solution for the caregivers as the primary user rather than the seniors.
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With a long list of helpful features to consider, we created a Feature Value Matrix that ranked each feature based on productivity, emotional support, user value, and business value. We decided that our MVP will include multi-user shared access, task assignment, and daily mood tracking.
After going through many rounds of pivots and ideation, the solution we came up with was to establish a simple way of sharing tasks while caring for a senior through the design of a mobile iOS app. We prioritized features to help our primary persona get trusted friends and family to support in her caregiving and emotional health. We created a first version of our mobile app via paper prototype and tested it out on caregivers to see if they were able to complete all tasks of the app.
The user can invite people to be a part of his/her "Inner Circle" and fill out a profile. After the profile is created, the user can place them in areas based on the strength of their relationship. The feature will show when someone's availability is and whether they have been assigned a task or not.
Our data revealed that caregivers felt discouraged to ask for help when they feel like others would be busy. This feature shows when someone is available to help out during the task's date and time, when necessary.
Users revealed that they feel emotionally drained. The Mood Tracking feature will help the user by keeping track of emotions at any given moment with a journal entry to promote self-care. Even though it can be kept private, giving the ability to share the mood log with a user's inner circle will help build a sense of connection and community while caring for an elderly loved one.
