ClearCare is a home care technology platform that helps manage all home care agency and caregiver needs. Hundreds of thousands of people across the United States rely on the product to help with their daily care for elderly and disabled clients. I led a team of designers to create the company's first native application which is now live on the Google Play App Store.
ClearCare already had an existing web app and telephony service that attempted to solve some of the problems in the home care industry. Originally catering to management agencies, ClearCare now sought to improve the experience for a much bigger portion of the industry; the caregivers themselves. Our role was to understand the biggest issues that agencies and caregivers experienced in the field and design a solution that the majority of their customers could adopt.
“This business rests on their shoulders. Transparency builds trust.”
“This business rests on their shoulders. Transparency builds trust.”
We kicked off the engagement by interviewing home caregivers and agency care managers across the US. By speaking directly with caregivers in the field we discovered insights that would eventually impact major design decisions down the line.
“I didn’t even know I had a shift scheduled for tomorrow.”
“I didn’t even know I had a shift scheduled for tomorrow.”
Additionally, we learned of a number of things that were very difficult to do with the current web app or telephony service solutions.
Compiling insights gleaned from our user research and interviews we created a chronological timeline that plotted various needs and actions for both home caregivers and agency care managers. Highlighting points of overlap, this resource was invaluable in identifying areas where we could improve or augment existing processes.
Next we set out to visualize what some common user flows within the app looked like. Having identified frequent pain points in our journey maps we created task flows which outlined the steps a user takes in order to achieve a goal. These flows allowed us to rapidly map out core functionality and simplify tasks that were currently difficult in the existing web app and telephony solutions.
By utilizing our user journey maps and task flows I created a sitemap which outlined the overall structure for the entire application. I organized it into three distinct states which we had identified based on varying user priorities before, during and at the end of a shift. Push notifications, listed in red, were helpful reminders designed to improve the experience for caregivers.
The first signs of what would become the final product began to take form in our wireframes. We organized screen flows into discrete sections as identified from our task flows and sitemap.
Putting labeled placeholders on every screen within a flow ensured we wouldn’t lose sight of anything as we went along. Soliciting feedback from the team at ClearCare helped us avoid investing time in designing features that would need to get pushed off for a later release anyway.
To give the new product an identity our team looked to the existing ClearCare logo for inspiration. From this single mark came a family of (future) product logos that all sat comfortably along the parent identity. With our deadline approaching, my team brilliantly executed on the app’s branding as I continued to manage and mock up screens.
Google's Material Design system served as the foundation for the visual design throughout the app. It allowed the small team to stay nimble and consistent in our designs, especially when each of us was working on completely different parts of the product.
We used the existing ClearCare color palette to style our screens and utilized material icons as a visual aid whenever possible. Keeping our messaging extremely clear and explicit was very important since we knew many users may not speak English as their native language.
With the home care industry being brand new territory for our team it was critical for us to get feedback from actual users early and often. We assembled interactive prototypes of common user flows and put them in front of caregivers. Their responses validated many of our design decisions but also gave us direction on how to improve and clarify other areas of the app.
After addressing edge-cases with design iterations we were all excited to see the app launch in the app store to glowing reviews! Since launch, the product has helped hundreds of thousands of caregivers deliver better assistance to elderly and disabled all across the country.
"I worked with Mike on our mobile app project and highly recommend him. He made sure to understand our vision, customer needs and project goals to design a beautiful mobile app. I can't wait to work with him again!"
—Shantanu Rangnekar, Senior Director of Product Management