Reciprocare
Project: Two and a half week group project working with Reciprocare to prototype a website that connects agencies and caregivers
Role: Project Manager
Elements: User Research | Prototype Creation | Interaction Design
Where: General Assembly User Experience Design Immersive
Summary
What is Reciprocare?
The nation is aging. There is a shortage of qualified caregivers, and yet caregivers struggle to find enough work. Each time an agency hires a caregiver, the agency must make sure all the legal requirements are met, a process than can take weeks to complete for positions that usually need to be filled immediately. Reciprocare aims to solve this bottleneck by prequalifying caregivers and providing a platform for agencies to find the right caregiver for a job.
The Problem
We were charged with creating a prototype for the agency side of the platform. To work as a business model, agencies must use the Reciprocare platform.The problems we faced were:How do we make agencies want to use ReciprocareHow do we keep agencies using Reciprocare’s paid services
The Team
We were a team of three General Assembly students working closely with the founder of Reciprocare. Within the team we designated roles according to our particular strengths. I was the project manager, because of my strong organizational skills, and we also had a product manager and a lead designer. Because we were a small team we worked closely together and we each worked on most elements of the project.
The Process
| My Role | |
|---|---|
| Project Plan | Responsible For |
| Competitive Analysis | Participated In |
| User Interviews | Participated In |
| Personas | Responsible For |
| Design Studio | Participated In |
| Wireframes | Participated In |
| User Testing | Participated In |
| Visual Design | Informed |
| Interactive Prototype | Responsible For |
The Solution
To get agencies using Reciprocare, we created a landing page that explained the benefits of Reciprocare and gave them an easy way to get in touch with an actual person.
To keep them on Reciprocare we developed an intuitive interface that simplified a complex process balancing the principles of good design with the specific needs of the industry and the target audience.
Further, we developed a scheduling system that would only work within the platform so that the agencies could not simply contact caregivers to get around having to pay Reciprocare.
The Process
Planning
To build consensus within the team I produced a project plan that the team agreed upon. Then, to manage client expectations, we sent a condensed version of this plan to the client.
Project plan
Competitive Analysis
As a group we decided which websites to look at in the competitive analysis. We then distributed the websites between us. We looked at competitors specifically in the care space as well more generalist job sites and recruitment websites in other industries that perform similar services.
We confirmed the features that were important to be competitive in the employment market and that Reciprocare does address a gap in the market.
User Interviews
As a team we interviewed 10 people in total. We distributed these interviews across the team. Some of the interviews we did individually and others in pairs.
All of the people interviewed were either directly part of our target market or closely acquainted with the care industry.
We put the takeaways from these interviews on Post-it notes and created an affinity map.
Affinity mapping user interview findings
Personas
I distilled the information from the affinity map into three personas. I created two agency personas to represent the differing opinions we encountered during user interviews. Even though we were designing the agency side, I also created a caregiver persona so that we did not lose sight of the platform's other users.
Design Studio
To get the ideas flowing, we did a group design studio exercise for each of the key screens.
Wireframes and User Testing
After the design studio, we assigned specific screens to each team member to wireframe. I will focus here on the wireframes I personally designed. When we had all completed our assigned wireframes, I compiled them and each team member tested the compiled wireframes on a member of our target audience.
Agency Dashboard Version One
The aim of the dashboard is to provide the agency with the features they will use most often in one place. In the first iteration we thought these would be the inbox and the job board.
First Version of Agency Dashboard
Agency Dashboard Version Two
Through user research and discussions with our client, we realized that if agencies and caregivers could communicate directly, they could just exchange contact information and Reciprocare would no longer be needed. To avoid this, in our second iteration we instead of an inbox we have a schedule where the agency can indicate available interview slots and the caregivers can schedule interviews without any direct communication.
Second Version of Agency Dashboard
Caregiver Profile Version One
The caregiver profile was a challenge because of the sheer amount of information it needed to contain. We tried to summarize but our users indicated that they needed to see all the information.
First Version of Caregiver Profile
Caregiver Profile Version Two
The second version is more modern looking with better use of white space and clearer calls to action.
In testing our users indicated that they wanted to see more detailed information on caregiver availability, so this has been added.
We had initially intended to add a pop-up to show the criteria that were matched with a posted job. In the second iteration, we realized we could show this more effectively by simply highlighting the matched information on the profile.
Second Version of Caregiver Profile
Interactive Prototype
Once the findings of the second round of user testing had been collated, our lead designer added visual polish to our wireframes, then I added the interactions in Axure.
