Context
Launched in 2007, Care.com is an online marketplace for families to find childcare, pet care, senior care and more. The platform also serves as a job board where caregivers can find part time or full time care jobs. Care.com was recently acquired by new leadership with a goal to revitalize the aging platform and an ambition to make it the most trusted choice for care. They enlisted IDEO to shape this design effort and help transform the platform into a modern, considerate, and human-centered user experience.
In other words: How might we design a digital care experience that engenders trust, safety, and warmth?
We began by interviewing a number of Care.com’s users, with them walking us through the stressors and pain points of the platform. We used this collection of knowledge to develop a user journey of not just the platform itself, but also the greater caregiver/care seeker journey. The project would continue on for three months, with other key activities including a detailed audit of their current ux and the development of new features for their platform.
Process
Role
My focus areas were primarily :
Auditing the current UX experience and cataloguing inconsistencies
Conducting qualitative user interviews and transforming learnings into a user journey
Developing research insights and identifying opportunities for future features
Designing and developing key screens for both caregivers and care seekers
Making sense of the client’s tech platform constraints and recommending quick wins to immediately improve the UX while longer term designs continued
Outcomes
Design Principles
After auditing their current user experience, I gathered my findings and categorized the challenges of the existing platform. These then evolved into new design principles to guide the UX moving forward.
Job Dashboard
Previously, Care.com was primarily a freeform messaging platform. It allowed people in search of care to make a job post, asking for caregivers to reply with their information. This approach generated a tremendous amount of responses, but users had no way to easily sort through them.
Our first improvement was creating a task-oriented dashboard for care seekers to manage responses to their job postings. Some of the major features included the ability to compare candidates, have the platform advise next actions, and let the care seekers organize their list of applicants. Once a candidate was hired, the platform would now notify all other applicants that the job was closed.
Improved Messaging Tools
We found in research that both caregivers and care seekers wanted to personally vet the other party in order to be comfortable agreeing on a contract. Our redesigned messaging tools included on-platform video calling so users could connect safely without exchanging personal contact info. We also introduced a built-in scheduling tool for users to arrange times to connect.
Caregiver Experience
For caregivers, we revamped how they can discover and search for opportunities. For the first time, they were now able to filter their searches for work with various criteria, see approximately where jobs were located on a map, and view the jobs in a calendar view. They could also set preferences for potential jobs and be alerted of new opportunities that match, across all types of care giving available on the platform.
Outcome
Over the duration of this project with Care.com, we reshaped their understanding of what really mattered to their users. The experience was transformed from something functional into something considerate. Users celebrated the improvements, especially caregivers who had never before been asked what they truly needed, calling it “life changing”. The client was thrilled with our work and before it was over, they signed up for two additional phases of work.