Project Overview
01｜Objective
Our team wanted to solve the problem of being difficult to find a proper dementia institution in Taiwan. Also, we wanted to build a platform that can solve the problem from both caregivers and institution, and achieve our business goal.
02｜Role & Deliverables
In this team project, I worked closely with PM and Marketing manager. My role included UX research and UI design, from understanding the user, defining problems, to deliver the final visual artifact.
03｜Challenges
Through this project, the problem we faced is the number of Taiwan's institutions, the market size will not be profitable enough.
04｜Outcome & Impact
We launched the MVP in six months that increased our overall metrics significantly, especially it increased the revenue by 12%. We also received a lot of positive feedback from users.
Booking Care：Help caregivers find the most proper Dementia Institutional Care
Duration
7 months (2021/10-2022/04)
My Role
UIUX Designer
Responsiblity
0-1 Product design
Background
This project is initiated by a UX competition named "ST-TRANS ACTION AWARD（林口新創跨界超越競賽）". While deciding the problem that our team wanted to solve, the difficulty of caring dementia patients jumped into our mind. After discussing various possibilities, we decided to solve the problem of dementia caring, in that all of our team members had faced this problem in our families, which can easily lead us to empathize our users.
First meet with my team member
Online meeting with team members
Process
During this five months, we put much efforts on defining the real problem and iterating for a better solution.
We started with emphasizing user's problem
User Interview
In the early phase of this project, we conducted user interview to identify the core problems of dementia care.The followings are what we learned：
Interview Insight：
"The information on the Internet is being too mess to find. I cannot find a dementia institution that can fulfill my need"
"I'm stressed out, but nobody can understand my tiredness. I have no one to tell how hard it is to take care of dementia patient day and night."
"I was rejected by many institutions. They said my mother-in-law's situation is too complicated"
Expert Interview
Except for desk research and user interview, we invited a lead who is operating an institution to share her observation about the elderly care industry. Therefore, we can have a deeper understanding of the environment and what problems would caregivers and a family faced when sending their family members into the institution. And here is what we found：
How difficult the caring process is：
How difficult to find a proper institution that can accept their family member :
"Most of the time we would accept caregiver's request to bring their dementia patients to out institution. However, in some situation, we could not accept them. For example, the patient has a problem of wandering at night, or the patient is being a high level of dementia. Even we want to accept, our capacity is not enough.
"We have seen so many caregivers feeling tired and frustrated during the caring process, especially the primary family caregiver, mostly female. They couldn't stop taking care of the patients, and this often harm their physical and mental health."
Define the problem
HMW Version 1
We received various problems through interviews. However, there are some we found important and emergent to solve. Here, we narrowed down massive problems into a few Point of View and came up with an HWM statement：
"HMW Design a product that makes
dementia caregiversrelease their negative feelings."
At the beginning of this phase, we were focusing on how to release the caregiver's stress and emotions. And started to do brainstorming and quickly move to the ideation part. However, after concept testing, we discovered that：
"Although we provided methods that can release their stress, they could not feel confident, in that they still have to take care of the dementia patients afterwards."
Redefine the Need
HMW Version 2
Thus, we noticed that the user’s needs haven’t been correctly defined. After concept testing, we found out the user's needs. Dementia caregiver needs to see their family members being nicely cared, for rather than letting out their steam.
HMW create an experience that caregivers can feel that their family members are being taken good care of.
Ideate
Concentrating on the caregiver’s need of knowing their family members to perfectly care, we started to broadly ideate any possibilities on Miro. After a few rounds of discussion, we finally came up with the idea of institutional care searching website. In order to design a dementia-care searching website, I conducted a competitive analysis of all dementia-care-related websites in Taiwan, especially focusing on their color system, contents, and information architecture.
Competitive Analysis
Prototype
The MVP
After scoping out what we wanted to deliver, I started working on the visual design and addressing the interaction detail. This MVP version is fairly simple and it only took us around a week to build it. We want to use this MVP to see how the caregiver and the institution will react and gather more feedback to help us keep iterating on it. The core features for this release include…
Testing
Within 2 weeks, we invited 2 caregivers and 1 institution to use “Booking Care” and give us feedback, and here are what we learned：
User's Feedback：Useful but want to know more information
The 2 users found it useful to search for an institution, but they may want to see more about “HOW Institution take care of their patients”
Dementia Institution's Feedback：Really helpful for caregivers to find institution.
The institution shown their high expectations to the website. The lead of the institution explained that most of the searching website did not include such complete information.
Final Design
01
Add three tubes (三管) in the filter.
From the second user interview, we found that there are more decisive elements while searching for an institution. Not only the stages of dementia, patient's movement, and mobility, but also the three tubes（三管）, which are the nasogastric tube（鼻胃管）, the urinary catheter（尿管）, and tracheostomy tube（氣切管）. And we redesign it for a better selection system.
02
Presenting the REAL caring situation by
videos and photes.
Through user testing and research, we noticed that most institutions are busy and lack time to film visual elements showing the way they operate and bring care to patients. Due to this problem, we changed the environment photo to a real-life picture and the video, so that users can see how these institutions took care of their patients.
03
A test of knowing what kind of institution is suitable for their patients.
For those who are first facing this difficult decision and do not know how to choose an institution, we provide a test letting caregivers know how to get started and realize what kind of institution is the most suitable for their family members.
Learning and Takeaway
"Booing Care" is my first project designing for dementia care. During the process, all of the issues about dementia are new to me. And the person who interacted with me often was from another generation who held different thinking and beliefs. The most challenging mission is to understand their pain points and translate them into the design.
Also, caregivers are almost busy and tired, so the ability to control the time limitation and dig into their inner needs in a short time is needed to be trained. And I found myself improved after lots of user interviews and user testing.
Through this process, I could somehow say that I can solve the problem of the elderly. Although this project is not fully prepared, I have many thoughts and ideas while sorting out this project. I think this is one of the most influencial experiences in my designing life, and it inspired me to keep pushing myself to become a better problem-solver.