Improved Plan
Home Care
Home Care is an app where nursing assistants can get their daily planning, document home care client visits, unlock digital locks for e.g. medicine cabinets, and communicate with each other.
The Challenge
Too Little Time for Transportation
The home care staff in a customer organization had reported feeling stressed at work, because the time allowed for traveling between the client visits in their daily planning often felt too short.
No Overview in the Planning
It was hard to get a sense of how much breathing room there actually was between the visits in their planning overview. The start and end times for the visits were there, but it required extra effort to figure out how long they had in between.
Hard to Communicate the Problem
The presentation of times in the app made it hard for the staff to point out where the stress regularly occurred and the planning needed to be adjusted.
Co-Creating A Solution
User Workshops
This project happened during the COVID-19 pandemic, so we set up design workshops remotely with stakeholders from the customer organization.
The goal was to make sure we understood the needs, and to ideate solutions together.
Participants
Staff from different home care units, who mentor their colleagues in using e-health tools.
Centralized e-health managers who drive the e-health strategy.
How Might We...?
Insights from the workshops were formulated as "how might we" questions to guide design decisions.
...help users feel calmer and more in control of their day?
...give users a good overview of their day at a glance?
...help users easily see what is travel time and what is visit time?
...help users quickly spot and report problems in their plans?
...help users to more easily distinguish between past and future visits in their plan?
...minimize the need to scroll when a plan contains many visits?
Exploring Ideas
These ideas were co-created and evaluated with the workshop participants, and discussed with developers in between.
No scrolling added.
Number of minutes is easier to understand than start and end times for transportation.
CONS
Easy to miss.
Not immediately clear if the time refers to the way to or from the adress.
Easy to spot the travel times at a glance.
Clear what the time refers to.
CONS
Addresses are repeated.
The amount of text visible at the same time felt overwhelming.
Easy and quick to read.
Some users felt calmer when they had a more airy overview with fewer visits visible.
Adding an icon made the rows feel balanced.
CONS
Introduces a lot more scrolling.
Having the minutes in more focus felt stressing.
Not all users understood the symbol.
This symbol made more sense to participants.
The single row with less text was quick to read.
CONS
The overview felt somewhat aged with the alternating row colors.
There was too much scrolling for some users.
The Winning Solution
The iterative design process led up to this solution.
Just Enough
The time info is placed and written to clearly belong to a visit, be easy to see and disappear once it is no longer relevant, which saves screen space.
Easier to See Done vs. To-Do
The visuals of done visits were toned down, to move focus away from them.
To draw more focus to future visits, they got an icon, bolder text and kept their text color.
