Improving Senior Care
With tech debt and unnecessary workarounds, Caring was in need of an upgrade to their partner experience.
Client
Caring helps families find senior care through expert advice, reviews, and comparison tools. To support its partners, it offers tools for managing listings and reporting move-ins—but the outdated portal created friction across the business. Caring brought in Able, a NYC-based agency, to modernize the platform and improve the partner experience.
The Process
1. Discover
To design something meaningful, I began by gaining a deep understanding of the existing experience. I focused on uncovering what was broken, how it affected partners, and where friction occurred in their day-to-day tasks.
2. Define
Using insights from research, I identified the core problem and worked with internal teams to set focused goals. These goals were crafted to deliver clear value to partners and alleviate operational challenges for the business.
3. Develop
Once aligned on the problem, I explored potential solutions through rapid prototyping and iteration. I collaborated closely with stakeholders to ensure each direction was both effective and scalable.
4. Deliver
With a validated direction in place, I moved into execution by refining the user experience and building a streamlined, role-specific interface. The result was a flexible system aimed at enhancing workflows and supporting future growth.
“Our current technology is crippling our growth. We’re jeopardizing the future of the business.”
Research & Insights
We began by immersing ourselves in the current partner experience, identifying pain points through direct observation, stakeholder interviews, and a deep dive into the legacy system. We discovered a disjointed, outdated tool that imposed unnecessary burdens on both partners and Caring's internal teams, resulting in lost revenue and duplicated efforts.
Tool Exploration
I accessed the existing portal and completed the full onboarding flow as a partner would.
Interviews
Conducted over 10 in-depth interviews with internal stakeholders and customer-facing teams to understand specific pain points in their workflows.
Requirement Gathering Workshops
Facilitated requirement sessions with 45 team members to ensure all legacy features were accounted for while noting new feature requests for future iterations.
Workflow Journeys
For tasks involving multiple team members, journey maps were utilized to ensure that every aspect was considered.
Feature Requirements
For features like User Management, a different approach was employed to better understand the differences between internal and external user capabilities.
Establish Goals
Using insights from research, I identified the core problem and worked with internal teams to set focused goals. These goals were designed to deliver clear value to partners and reduce operational pain for the business.
Remove Impersonation
For Caring team members to make changes to partner accounts, they had to 'impersonate' a partner user, editing the partner's information from that perspective. This approach led to a lack of accountability tracking and was counterintuitive, as partners had more capabilities than Caring, the tool's owner.
Improve Onboarding
A third-party form was used to capture all information for gathering partner and location data. However, the form was insufficient, consisting of four separate pages yet not enough options to allow partners to create locations that fit their needs.
Enhance Custom Roles
Users required permissions based on their roles and seniority levels. However, the system was limited to only five permission group settings, which failed to accommodate the complexity of user needs. Each user needed to have the ability to create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) content as part of their permission settings.
Increase Move-In Ease
Successful referrals (or leads) needed to be reported in the Partner Portal for Caring to bill the partners effectively. However, the existing system was non-intuitive and lacked essential features.
“We can’t keep track of the communities with 800 leads that only report a few. That creates alot of work for our team to track down and report each move-in.”
Ideate, Explore & Prototype
Once aligned on the problem, I explored potential solutions through rapid prototyping and iteration. I worked closely with stakeholders to ensure each direction was both useful and scalable.
Establish a Cadence
Given the fast pace of our research, design, and development processes, we needed an efficient way to gather input from the large group. We implemented Portal Team Workshops to facilitate quick feedback on new features.
Workshop Reviews
During the design phase, the bi-weekly workshops proved invaluable. What began as a broad requirements-gathering exercise for the entire portal quickly revealed the complexity of each feature.
Remove Impersonation
The current model required Caring admins to impersonate partner users, accessing the tool from their perspective. This approach not only created numerous issues but also extended development time.
To address this, I created a mock-up diagram and collaborated with our development team to ensure the functionality could be implemented effectively while alleviating any concerns from the Caring team.
Improve Onboarding
The existing process required partners to complete the form in one sitting, with no way to save progress. Additionally, it failed to account for the unique nuances of each location type, leading to limitations that often resulted in inaccurate submissions.
Enhance Custom Roles
Each partner required specific user permissions, location access, and notification settings. We gathered insights from our research sessions to establish a system that would allow for scaling over time.
Increase Move-In Ease
Each partner could access a comprehensive list of referrals from family advisors in one centralized location. With the implementation of an enhanced reporting system for successful move-ins, Caring admins experienced a significant reduction in their workload.
“The new onboarding requires less time from our team having to manually fix issues.”
Launch & Impact
The redesigned portal introduced role-specific experiences, better move-in tracking, and intuitive user management—all built on a scalable design foundation. Early results showed improved internal workflows and partner engagement, and the product is now positioned to evolve into a revenue-generating platform.
Results
With a portal now designed to efficiently address the unique needs of both partners and Caring team members, Caring is poised to pursue its long-term goal of transforming the portal into a revenue-generating tool.
Move-Ins
In the months following the portal's launch, reported move-ins have risen by 10%.
Locations
Achieved an 8% increase in locations created on the portal while reducing the need for assistance from Caring admin members.
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