Jacqueline Angelina, David Moon, Nathan Muldrow, Nicole Macam
Jacobs Institute of Design Innovation / Spring 2019
Presented to Care.com’s Product Design Team at San Francisco
Role: Ideation, UX Research, UI Design, Prototyping, User Testing
Overview
Care.com is a platform that connects families to childcare, eldercare, housecleaning, and tutoring providers. We developed a scheduling feature based on the Double Diamond design process.
Prompt: Redesign any feature on Care.com that will increase a provider’s experience - completely open ended.
01 Discover
User Research
To discover design opportunities, we conducted interviews with four Care.com providers, consisting of tutors, housekeepers and nannies. From these interviews, we identified three logistics-related areas where friction points were most prevalent: on-boarding, scheduling, and security.
Full interview notes can be found here.
Key insights:
- On-boarding: The sign-up process to become a caregiver is tiresome and complicated
- Scheduling: None of the caregivers use Care’s scheduling system on mobile + some were never aware of the existence of Care’s scheduling feature (it’s difficult to find on the app)
- Security: Nannies don’t feel safe when going to clients’ homes
**Note: Lack of use of Care’s payment platform and a higher preference to handle payments off platform was also mentioned by our interviewees. However, we saw this as a policy problem, instead of a design problem. Care.com doesn’t enforce use of its payment center and allows off-platform payments.
02 Define
We decided to tackle the scheduling problem - our interviewees’ most frequent complaint. Scheduling features are basic, foundational, and normally found in most activity-based apps today - yet they are increasingly necessary in the lives of on-the-go freelancers. With major players like Google Calendar already dominating the space, we wanted the challenge of developing a simple, necessary feature exclusively tailored to the specific needs of Care providers, yet adaptable to their existing scheduling preferences.
Defining our target user
From our interviews, we found that users who felt the most stressed in handling client management & scheduling were part-time providers with multiple, constantly changing clients. We concluded that these providers were users preferring flexible work schedules to balance other commitments outside of Care jobs, which became our chosen target audience.
We created a user persona to represent some of the emotions and thoughts that our interview group conveyed. We introduced Jess, a college student provider, looking to efficiently organize and balance her work and class schedule.
Storyboard
We then created a storyboard to envision Jess’ ideal experience using scheduling features on the Care app. The storyboard depicts Jess being overwhelmed with difficulties organizing her work & school schedule in scattered calendars. Care’s new feature to merge her online calendars together luckily allows her to successfully manage her tasks.
The Problem: How might we make scheduling jobs on Care.com more efficient for caregivers?
We propose that Care.com implement a function for users to actively maintain a calendar in-app. A scheduling function directly in-app will enable busy, part-time job seekers, such as students, to plan all Care.com work time slots alongside their personal lifestyles.
Care providers have 4 main scheduling goals:
1. Easily access their calendar on the Care app
2. Manually add an event or availability
3. Update/edit an existing event or availability
4. Import their Google Calendar
User Flow
For an in-depth exploration of how Jess would logically carry out these scheduling goals in the website or app, we created this user flow.
Iteration #1:
However, we realized that having two separate flows for web and mobile was unnecessarily complicated and could be confusing when users switch devices. In this updated user flow, we focused on creating consistency between scheduling on the desktop and app -- minimizing differences in how the user would schedule on separate devices.
Iteration #2:
Although initially intending to design for both web and mobile, time constraints only allowed us to focus on mobile.
03 Develop
Wireframing
Based on our design goals, we developed sketches and low-fidelity wireframes of our solution - designing the home page (positioning direct access to scheduling features), calendar, and other scheduling features (add/delete event, event conflict resolution).
Initial issues:
- The home page felt too cluttered with content and lacked visual hierarchy - the Calendar button was not obviously discoverable.
- The 7 day view of the Calendar felt limiting as it would only allow users to see how their schedules looked one week at a time.
We fixed these initial issues in our high-fidelity wireframes below.
Changes made:
- Use of headers, space, and color to add visual hierarchy and emphasize the visibility of the Calendar button
- Removal of small calendar icons to remove clutter on Calendar Screen
- Additional viewing options (3 day, 7 day, month)
Usability Testing
After finishing our initial prototype, we conducted usability tests to discover user reactions to our revamped scheduling feature and get feedback. We approached 10 providers, including the four we initially interviewed, and asked them to complete scenario-based tasks on the prototype - testing the discoverability, functionality, and effectiveness of our main scheduling features. Original script can be found here.
From the tests, there were the four most prevalent usability issues:
04 Deliver
Final Prototype
In response to the feedback received from our usability tests, we made some changes - keeping what users felt was easy, and iterating on what they found difficult or frustrating.
What changed?
- To make the the text in the scheduling screen more legible for individuals that would not be able to comfortably read smaller text, we integrated a 3-day view of the Calendar to enlarge the block sizes and leave more room for bigger text.
- We changed the color scheme of the scheduling blocks to cooler tones to visually emphasize the red in the scheduling conflict, Bright teal available time slots, lavender for slots that the user marks as busy, and deep green for user scheduled work with a client on Care.com.
Interact with the prototype here.
Future Considerations
In developing/testing our final designs, we found that:
- Users are accustomed to certain usage patterns in other calendar/scheduling apps.
- Users want more ways to add and edit events
In the future, I would love to conduct more usability tests with a wider range of participants and incorporate feedback to further improve our product. It would also be interesting to explore integrations between our scheduling feature and other capabilities of Care.com’s app.
Additionally, this project definitely caught my interest in usage patterns. Should we present innovative products in novel ways or will new ideas be better accepted when conventionally communicated?
As this was my first end-to-end UX design project, done with a design thinking framework in mind - I was constantly amazed at how we were able to learn and iterate on something new from every design step. Room for improvement indeed always exists. I’m glad I was able to use design to further understand the gains and struggles of participating in today’s ever-growing gig economy, albeit only a small sector of it.