Improving Senior Care
With tech debt and unnecessary workarounds, Caring.com was ready to redesign their partner portal to provide partners more value while also creating a future potential revenue stream for themselves.
COACHING CLIENTS TO NEW HEIGHTS
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Client
Rethinking partner tools for senior living facilities
Caring had an existing partner portal riddled with technical debt which forced uses to perform workarounds for some their most important tasks. Of those tasks, submitting successful move-ins to their facilities was the top priority.
When a visitor came to Caring.com in search of care for themselves or a loved one, they were shown a list of potential locations that they could choose to learn more about. Once they found the right facility and moved-in, the partner needed to submit that move-in through Partner Portal. Caring would charge the facility a fee for each move-in with a rate pre-determined during the Partner onboarding.
Through exploration of the existing tool, continuous research, and collaboration with the Caring team we created an intuitive application that streamlined processes for both Partner and Caring team members.
Caring's primary tool for partner management was outdated, non-intuitive, and preventing revenue.
With a business relying on partners to submit when a careseeker found a new home at their facility and a platform incapable of handling the unique needs of those facilities, it handcuffed the team at Caring into using workarounds and an inefficient process.
“We can’t keep track of the communities with 800 leads and only report a few.”
Understanding The Problem
With an existing application already in place, users knew what was useful and what new abilities could add value for themselves and their partners. Throughout the project, ongoing research efforts were made to gather as much information as possible as we built in step with the Caring team.
Tool Exploration
While I waited to schedule interviews with stakeholders, I was given access to the existing portal. The first step was exploring the platform to build a base knowledge for the interviews and workshops I would lead. I needed to understand the terminology users were using to get up to speed as quickly as possible.
Interviews
The goal of the 1 on 1 stakeholder interviews was to ensure that both our team and Caring were aligned from the very beginning. Our goal was to create a partner portal that would be valuable for partners and would improve efficiency for Caring team members as they performed daily tasks.
Over the course of 10+ stakeholder interviews, I’d have the stakeholder often share their screen to do contextual inquiry type approach so that they could show exactly how they go about their daily tasks.
The interviews often had points of emphasis throughout which led to interesting followup thoughts/questions that would need to be answered by a larger group within workshops to ensure that we weren’t creating a solution within a silo.
Continous Workshops
Workshops were held twice weekly throughout the entirety of the 12 month project to gain project requirements for each feature of the project. With speed of the essence, we needed to be researching, designing and building all in parallel. My goal throughout each workshop was to uncover as many potential obstacles as possible forcing us to redesign and ultimately rebuild numerous aspects within the tool.
Initial workshops had as 20 users to ensure that we were getting the largest amount of perspectives from people who use the tool as to not miss requirements. As the sessions became more focused on individual features, the amount of users dwindled as we only needed those with the deepest of knowledge in that particular section to weigh in. At the beginning of each week I would alert the Portal team via slack channel (50+ members) what the upcoming week’s session focuses would be.
Biggest Areas for Opportunity
After the first workshops were complete where we gathered what from legacy we needed to keep and which new requests needed to be accounted for, we began to solidify requirements. It became clear that there were a few key problem areas.
Impersonation
For Caring team members to make changes to partners, they needed to ‘impersonate’ a partner user and edit the partner as that user. This causes a lack of accountability tracking and is non-intuitive as the partners have more capabilities than Caring, the owner of the tool.
Creating a Location
A 3rd party form is used to capture all information for gathering partner and location. The form was clunky, 4 separate pages and being 3rd party, Caring was not in full control of the form forcing non-ideal ways through the form.
User Management
Users needed permissions based off role and seniority. As it was built, there were only 5 permission group settings to choose from while the need was much more complex than that. Each user needed the options to have the ability to create, read, update and delete as part of their permission settings (CRUD).
Publishing
The final step of the process was taking the partner and it's location live. This publishing process required numerous users and tools to get the job done, leading to issues with accountability and not being sure what step had already been completed or not.
Impersonation
As Caring team members and partners needed to take nearly the same actions throughout the tool, rather than having 2 separate apps like the current tool, I cocepyualized an idea that combined the interfaces and provided content based off your role/team.
Creating a Location
The existing process of creating a partner was long and could not be customized to the needs of each facility type. This caused confusion for users has some questions were not applicable to them but still needed to be answered to complete the form.
Gathering Requirements
During the design phase of the create location flow the twice weekly workshops were very useful. What started as requirements gathering for the entirety of the portal quickly highlighted the complexity of each featuring.
Repurposing the workshops to be about the feature currently being designed allowed me to get instant feedback. Since we were researching, designing and building at the same time to meet our deadline, any new requirements gathered during the workshops were quickly shared with the dev team.
Full Flow
Over 2 months and 20+ workshops, we refined the create location flow to account for all of the known variables that locations demand.
User Management
In the existing portal users had to choose from 5 sets of predetermined permission groups which was not nearly enough flexibility required for the demands of the users.
Gathering Requirements
Through a set of dedicated user permission workshops we determined the capabilities required of both internal and external users. We explored the idea of having ‘roles’ that users could create and apply to new users but ultimately abandoned the idea after testing the concept in a real life scenario with a new partner being onboarded and their users not perfectly aligning with the roles, causing issues.
Managing Users
In an effort to not slow down users once we sunset the old Portal for the new UI, we made sure that intuitive templates were utilized to reduce onboarding time.
Publishing
Publishing a partner and their location was the final step in the process to ensure leads could be generated. Given the amount of steps and users involved, it was important that we gather the current workflow to ensure no users/steps were left out.
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