UX Case Study 3
Assigning a Caregiver
Desktop Web for Enterprise
UX Design Skills
Information Architecture
Icon Design
UX Copywriting
Feature Prioritisation
User Flows
User Interface Design
End-to-end feature design
Usability Testing
Caregivers apply for jobs, and Homage chooses the best candidate among the pool of applicants for each job.
Context
Homage is a two-sided, managed marketplace where customers can get home caregiving support on demand via the mobile app.
Caregivers are highly curated on the marketplace; each caregiver is an individual with a specific range of valued skills and experience. Customer needs are also highly differentiated where they might need a caregiver with specific nursing competencies language skills, schedule availability and so on.
When a customer booked visits on the Homage platform, caregivers would be able to apply, and multiple caregivers might apply for the same job. Homage would consider the various applicants and choose the best person for the job based on a multitude of factors.
Goals
We wanted to launch a new feature on the enterprise backend to help internal Operators assign the best caregiver to each job. It would allow Operators to:
Understand the upcoming care requirements and preferences of the customer
Compare each caregiver to other caregivers within the applicant pool for the same visits
Assign the most suitable Care Professional in the right priority, with appropriate checks and balances
With clear visibility, Operators would be able to assign the best-matched caregiver for the job in a prioritised and efficient manner. Both the customer and the caregiver would benefit from quicker visibility over whether the visit had been assigned.
My Role
I was the sole PM, UI/UX designer and QA tester on this feature and I worked closely with a team of 5 engineers (3 backend, 2 mobile). I reported to the CPO for this project.
For the designs, I began with paper sketching, then moved to low-fi wireframing and high-fidelity mockups.
The goal for design was to provide the human decision-maker with sufficient context, so that caregivers could be assigned with ease and speed.
Context is key
To successfully assign the most suitable caregiver, an internal Operator would need to triangulate between the following sources of information:
Customer’s preferences for caregiver attributes (tied to the person and not each visit)
Customer’s visit requirements at the visit level (1 person could have multiple visits with varying requirements)
Caregiver’s attributes (tied to the caregiver herself and not each visit)
Caregiver’s applications at the visit level
The current state of assignments for that particular customer’s visits
The volume of caregivers who were invited to apply for a visit (should the Operator keep waiting for better applicants to come up, or go ahead right now?)
Point #5 was quite mind-blowing given the sheer number of possibilities. We knew that customers would prefer to have the same caregiver as frequently as possible, to have continuity for the senior and deepen the relationship. However, from the Operator’s point of view, we had to think about assignment decisions not just for a single customer but across customers and try to optimise caregivers for the entire marketplace.
I did a deep dive with the Operations team to find out how each person thought about the assignment process and completed it. Each Operator (who themselves are individuals with their own working styles, mental models, and relationships with the caregivers and imperfect information) had a slightly different way of approaching the assignment process. There was no standardised or automatic way to optimise for these decisions that would work in all scenarios.
Hence, the goal for design was not to determine the outcome of the assignment, but to provide the human decision-maker with sufficient context and quick access to the right information, so that the decision could be made with ease and speed.
Checks and balances
It was fascinating and also somewhat dreadful to think of how many pitfalls could happen - all in a day’s work for product design where considering the sad cases is as important as the happy case.
For example, bad situations resulting from human error and imperfect information that we managed to prevent with good design were:
Visits had applicants, but the Operator missed it out
Caregiver was already assigned to a visit on the same day, but still applied.
Caregiver has another visit assignment that would risk tardiness to this visit.
e.g. Amy was technically not assigned at the time of Visit A, but due to an existing assigned visit before (or after) Visit A, she might not be able to travel to Visit A in time to start work punctually.
I experimented with various designs for alerts and error messages. For the latter especially it was interesting to come up with copy for error messages that were clear and helpful without being verbose.
Go-to-Market and Launch
To launch this feature, there was a considerable amount of training and workflow change management required. I engaged the Operations team in early design reviews and got their inputs on some of the ordering of the information I also wrote a manual on the flow to guide them through during the initial adoption period.
Outcome
From the launch, 100% of Homage visits were assigned to caregivers using this flow, and 100% ever since. The basic flow has been in place for a couple of years, that said, we did iterate the flow with more bell and whistles in subsequent months, to cater for new business verticals and requirements. This meant including displaying even more information (in the right place, of course), such as caregiver utilisation and other datapoints.
Learnings
#1: Make the design more space efficient
Some techniques are listed below, in ascending order of how disruptive they are into the main flow of actions:
tooltips (on click, or on hover)
accordions (more/less, expand all/collapse all, chevrons, etc)
slide-out drawers or panels
modals
links out wherever necessary It’s fun to figure out which pattern would work best in a specific flow.
#2: Keep UX copy brief
Especially for repetitive use cases, so that power users can truly focus on the task at hand. No user is going to read every word of copy especially on their nth experience, so a one-liner would suffice.
#3: Checks and balances are crucial
Checks and balances are so important, but just like copy, power users can quickly get desensitised to them. That’s why it is important to ensure that the visual design, e.g. using icons or colours or text hierarchy for emphasis, can communicate the message succinctly with the right amount of punch.