User Experience (UX) Design for Domiciliary Care
Role
UX Design, UX Research, Persona, User Research, UI Design, Heuristic Evaluation, Iteration, Wireframing, UserFlows, WorkFlows, Prototyping, Iteration, Design Thinking, Interaction Design, Visual Design, StoryTelling
Tools
Figma, Miro, Visual Studio Code, React, Adobe Photoshop, Teams, MS Office.
Duration
Nov 2024 - Jan 2025
Overview
Excubated is a startup focused on domiciliary care, offering services to a global clientele across Canada, the USA, the UK, Australia, and the rest of Europe. The company specializes in a domiciliary care app that allows users to request or offer care to seniors.
In my role at Excubated, I worked on improving the UX of the UK version of the domiciliary care app. My focus was on streamlining the user experience to ensure that users could receive care quickly and efficiently, eliminating unnecessary steps and simplifying the process for a seamless experience.
Spearheaded the end-to-end UX design function for the project, directing strategy, design decisions, and execution while aligning outcomes with business goals through cross-functional collaboration.
Problem
Designing technology for domiciliary care is challenging due to the diverse needs of users across generations.
Older adults often struggle with cognitive overload and cluttered interfaces, making tasks like scheduling or modifying care appointments difficult.
At the same time, younger users may find simplified designs lacking essential features, creating a disconnect in expectations. Additionally, ensuring security for sensitive health data is critical, especially for those less familiar with digital privacy.
Creating a solution that balances usability, accessibility, and security is key to meeting the needs of both generations.
Addressing the Problem
Complete UserFlow of One Persona
Task 1: Personas
What They Are: Personas are fictional, generalized representations of target users based on research, aimed at understanding their needs, goals, and behaviors.
Why They're Useful: They help designers empathize with users, ensure the design meets specific user needs, and make decisions based on user-centric insights.
How They Helped:
Identify Workflows: Personas help map out each user group's steps when interacting with the system.
Highlight Pain Points: They reveal challenges each user type faces, such as cognitive overload or navigation issues.
Define User Requirements: Personas clarify the specific features required for each user group to ensure usability and accessibility.
Distinguish Design Needs: They show the different needs of younger and older users, allowing designers to tailor interfaces accordingly.
Identify Interconnected Elements: By comparing personas, overlapping design elements and features across age groups can be recognized.
Address Design Requirements: Personas guide the design decisions, ensuring each group’s needs are met without compromising the overall user experience.
Identification of UX principle violations and design suggestions
Task 2: In-depth Heuristic Evaluation with UI Development
What It Is: A heuristic evaluation is a method for identifying usability issues in a design based on established UX principles. It involves evaluating the interface to find problems and propose improvements, ensuring the design is intuitive, accessible, and efficient for users.
Why It's Useful: It helps designers spot flaws early in the design process, ensuring the product aligns with best practices and improves user experience before development begins. It also helps make informed decisions backed by UX guidelines.
How It Helped
Heuristic Evaluation: Evaluated the entire website to identify 20+ design changes needed to improve usability, accessibility, and efficiency. These were based on common usability principles, such as consistency, feedback, and error prevention.
Referenced UX Principles: Each proposed change was backed by established UX principles, ensuring every recommendation had a solid rationale rooted in best practices and design standards.
Performed UI Development: Implemented and integrated the changes into the existing interface, using prototyping and iterative testing to ensure effectiveness. This included modifying layout, navigation, and interaction design based on user feedback.
Iterative Design & Feedback: Iterated on the design, testing, and refining the user interface based on user feedback. This continuous feedback loop ensured that the final design improved user satisfaction and met the target audience's needs.
Prototyped and Tested: Developed prototypes to simulate the changes and test the usability improvements, ensuring the new design flowed smoothly and solved identified problems.
Result and Takeaways
Streamlined User Flow: Helped smooth the user flow by identifying and implementing the most efficient workflows, ensuring users aged 27-67 could complete tasks with minimal steps.
Simplified Design: Simplified the design flow without compromising functionality, creating an intuitive user experience that enhanced usability without unnecessary complexity.
Identified and Addressed Over 20+ Design Issues: Pinpointed over 20 design issues across 6 personas, addressing challenges that impacted user experience. Suggestions and changes were supported by established UX principles to ensure the best possible experience without overcomplicating the design.
Implemented and Tested: Successfully implemented the changes and tested them through prototyping, gathering feedback from diverse personas to iterate and further refine the design for optimal performance