Elder

Elder is a live-in care introductory agency. They help customers find perfect carers for themselves or their loved ones. My role with Elder as a Product Designer was focused on implementing new functionalities to Elder’s products and improving the existing ones.

I worked primarly with a Product Manager and a team of back and front end developers. We often involved people from different parts of the business in our projects. We worked in a very collaborative way, sharing insights and ideating together during many meetings and workshops.

I was responsible for all product-related aspects of design (excluding themain website, which belonged to the Marketing team). I developed and improved functionalities within Elder's three user facing products: one for the customers, one for the carers, and an internal one.

Elder-pattern
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User journey mapping

At the time, Elder had been operating for two years already. Yet, the business didn’t have a clear idea about the journeys of our different users. Our challenge was to collect all relevant information about the users, define key points in their journeys, and what could be improved.

We started this work by piecing together a customer (usually care recipient’s family) journey map. We wanted to focus on all steps of their route to live-in care, which we defined starts much earlier than coming in contact with us. We mapped out the first trigger for their need for care, the discovery of the concept of live-in care, finding Elder, all their contact with us, up to the care being delivered, and then offboarding.

We supplemented this customer journey map with two additional onesrelevant to our other users: a very important carer journey map, showing the way our carers interact with Elder and how they actually look for work and later perform it, as well as a care recipient journey map to visualise how it looks from the perspective of the person receiving care.

Next step for us was to look for something we called Moments that matter – a combination of pain points as well as the moments that make the entire experience with our company; the events that help our customers decide whether to stay with us or leave.

Based on these Moments, we decided what future actions we as a business should take to improve these experiences and help our users.

Elder HUB redesign

One of the main products we own is Elder HUB. It’s the main place carers can find new work, build their experience profiles, and report on the placements they’re currently on.

Prior to the changes, this portal was difficult to navigate and provided carers with poor experience. The way of applying for placements wasn’t clear, carers had no control over their applications, and there was little functionality above that. With the improved portal, we wanted to give our carers a real tool that would help them perform better.

We restructured HUB’s architecture, simplifying the menu to four items:
– Journal, where they report daily on their current placement and access all necessary information,
– Schedule, where they control their upcoming placements and access all relevant information about them,
– Placements, where they can apply for new jobs,
– More, which gives them access to their profile, support etc.

We changed how the portal looks and feels. We improved the clarity of information and restructured how we present different types of it to carers. One of the biggest changes we introduced is how placement adverts are presented and which information is shown as the most important, so that carers can judge them at first glance and decide if they want to apply or not.

We test all changes with our carers regularly, gathering their feedback and improving the portal incrementally.

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Design system and component library

Defining the design language of our products was a very challenging and at the same time satisfying task. We wanted all our products to have a cohesive look that would reflect the Elder brand, while also exhibiting all user experience and usability values we stand for.

First step was to summarise our user experience rules into one document, so we could keep ourselves accountable. We defined such rules as Consistent look and feel, Expected behaviour, Informative feedback, Cognitive load etc. Our aim was to include best UX practices while taking into consideration our users’ specific needs and requirements.

All of these rules were included in the new design system. We definedeverything from the grid that all the visuals will sit on, through a new set of typography and colours compliant with WCAG 2.1, a new hierarchy of buttons and links, to an icon language system, error information and so on.

Based on these decisions, the development team was able to start working on a component library of all elements, which would help us in the future keep all our products consistent.

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