Care Professional Mobile App
Helping caregivers earn a flexible income and improve the quality of their services.
Rated 4.3 on App Store and 4.5 on Google Play.
What’s the Care Professional app all about?
The Care Professional app makes it easy and convenient for caregivers to:
Apply for a job
Manage their caregiving schedules
View their earnings on each caregiving session
Receive timely and contextual notifications
Write reports after each care session
Chat with families and Homage Operators
Get verified information about each caregiving case and learn caregiving tips
The app improves the caregiver’s experience by providing structured guidance around a complex process with many moving parts. By equipping the caregiver with the right information at the right time, the app simplifies the caregiving experience.
My Role
I was the Product Manager, UX designer and QA tester on this app from inception. The app was launched in approximately 6 months, together with the Homage mobile app and also the enterprise backend system on desktop web.
For the initial launch, I was supported briefly by a part-time UX designer who helped 3 days a week for three months.
We have been expanding and iterating the feature set consistently since launch based on new business priorities and user feedback.
Challenges
Tight timeline: We were planning to launch within a 6 month timeframe, which was aggressive given the team size and level of experience
End-to-end workflow design: We were designing the Care Professional app alongside the Homage app for families and our enterprise system, and had to define new workflows for situations which did not exist yet.
Usability Testing & User Feedback
The overall product management process was very similar between the Homage app and the Care Professional app, with one distinction. For the latter, we had frequent direct access to caregivers and hence were able to accomplish more user research and testing. The channels of engaging with the Care Pros directly included:
Usability testing sessions before a big feature iteration was launched. I prepared an interactive, high-fidelity prototype on Invision to simulate the new app features. Then, I briefed the Care Pro and assigned her a set of tasks to complete using the prototype, while timing and observing her click patterns and hesitations. The testing findings were valuable in helping us fine-tune what we were launching, and we also adjusted the planned pre-launch and post-launch communications to pre-empt the users’ questions.
Phone interviews post-launch to check in with specific demographics of Care Pros and collect feedback about the app
Online surveys including Net Promoter Score and questions about feature suggestions and preferences
In-person feedback sessions to listen to existing caregivers’ feedback on the app. This was such a rich source of insights not just on how the users interacted with the app, but also their context and mindset about caregiving.
Regular onboarding sessions for new caregivers, where I would guide users to log in to their apps for the first time. This was really useful to understand some of the hurdles faced by totally new users and the questions they had.
All the feedback that we gathered was then shared with the Product & Engineering team, then prioritised and actioned on (wherever possible).
Communications and Product Marketing
Each new enhancement to the Care Professional app meant an adjustment to the tasks and workflows performed by the caregivers. Part of my scope as a PM was to keep the users informed and confident of how to use each new app feature.
Typically, I worked with the Marketing, Care Operations and Care Professional Operations teams to cover multiple channels of communication, including:
Multiple drips in the regular Care Professional weekly newsletter leading up to the launch
Standalone EDM to cover the feature in depth
Push notifications to drive app updates and feature visibility
WhatsApp or SMS notifications for enhancements with operational risk
In-person sharing during events
For the communications, I would prepare:
banner graphics
videos or GIFs
explanatory attachment at a greater level of detail, e.g. a series of FAQs or a cheat sheet with 3 simple takeaways
Takeaways
I loved working on the Care Professional app; I learned so much from the caregivers and the team as we built and iterated it together over the years.
Good design is simple design
For the Care Pro app, no matter how many features we wanted to include, one thing was consistent - we needed to boil down the design and keep it as simple as possible; “cartoon simple” in the words of my CEO. With all due respect, the majority of our freelance caregivers were middle-aged and relatively inexperienced with mobile apps. Furthermore, the Care Professionals also had to juggle their app usage with their caregiving commitments and it was imperative for the app experience to be straightforward and smooth so that the caregivers could focus on the important details.
In brief, for the app to provide an effective and pleasurable experience for its actual users, simplicity is a necessity and not a nice-to-have.
It’s critical to handle data sensitively.
Homage is a healthcare company and naturally captures sensitive personal information about our customers and care recipients. Needless to say, we would also be privy to sensitive information about our Care Professionals in the course of onboarding them and matching them with opportunities.
As the PM and designer, I would frequently consider if a certain piece of information was necessary to share with the Care Professional, and if so, at which moment. For example, we needed to share a visit’s location with the Care Professional so they could choose whether to take up the job, however we would not share the exact location or house number to maintain the family’s privacy, until the caregiver was committed to the session. Conversely, the families would also be able to view the caregiver’s profile before the visit, but we would show only the key information about the caregiver to protect her privacy as well.
Every screen is a chance to elevate the caregiving experience
As we designed the app, I felt that we had a deeply meaningful opportunity to make the caregiving experience better, for both the family receiving the services and for the caregiver herself.
We improved transparency in the caregiving journey so that the Care Professional could equip herself with verified facts via the app and thus walk in more prepared. Furthermore, we planted encouragements and acknowledgements wherever we could to respect what the Care Professionals were doing every day. For example, when a Care Professional would begin a visit and clock in, the confirmation message would encourage them to “Give your best and make a difference.” With each little piece, I felt a lot of conviction that the product would do its part to help caregivers feel supported and acknowledged in the work that they do.