Elderly Home-Care Service App

Increase workflow efficiency and facilitate collaboration for clinical staff and front-line care workers.

Project Overview

Evangelical Lutheran Church Hong Kong (ELCHK) was faced with increasing demand for their home-care service due to the aging situation in Hong Kong. They needed to revamp service flow and offerings to increase workflow efficiency and service quality.

Our team designed new service flow and shipped three products to support client's new home-care services.

I was responsible for the user research, design system development and UX/UI design for one of the three products, which increase internal workflow efficiency and facilitate collaboration among employees.

Duration

Feb - Dec 2018

MY ROLE

User Research
UX Design
Prototyping
Usability Testing
Interface Design

Team

Henry F. (Project Director)
Luke L. (PM)
Neil C. (UX/UI Designer)
Sion C. (UX/UI Designer)
Engineer Team

background

The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Hong Kong (ELCHK) provides various Home Care Service to service users (seniors), including social service, nursing, physiological therapy and occupational therapy.

Senior Home Care Service
Challenges & GOals

As the population of the elderly in Hong Kong predicted to be increased to 31% of the population in 2036. Our client needed to improve their workflow efficiency to meet the increasing demand and continuous manpower shortage, and create innovative services to better monitor seniors' health condition and re-engineer seniors' lifestyle while idling at home.

Challenges under the aging situation in hong kong
project scope

There are three groups of users with different needs:

  • Clientele (Employees), including professionals (such as social workers, nurses, occupational therapists and physiotherapists) and frontline care workers, need to enhance work efficacy and improve collaboration.
  • Service User (The elderly) needs to improve the quality of life.
  • Caregiver (Family members) need to monitor their parent's health conditions and stay engaged with them.

Our teams designed and developed three applications for these three groups of users.

Senior Home Care Service
My contribution

I was the UX/UI designer in a team with two other designers. While working together closely throughout the research and overall design process, each of us was responsible for one application.

In the project, I was mainly working on the UX research, analysis and design for the clientele's Android application. I also developed the design system for three applications.

adaptive approach to unexpected challenges

Our design team decided to put emphasis on the research and testing because of the complex nature of clients' workflow and service, the diverse user groups and lack of understanding of the design for seniors' accessibility.

However, as our client changed functional requirements in the midway and the schedule was tight, we had to compromise on the time to spend on user testing. To make up for that, we decided to move parts of usability testing ahead to get feedback early while making adjustment on the function design.

User persona

This product is designed for two user groups: front-line care workers and professionals.

Front-line care worker
professional
research findings

I conducted interviews with 10 employees, followed and observed their daily work and visit to seniors' home, analyzed their work documents and current CMS system.

01. Front-line care workers need clear & updated schedule, task know-how, and be able to get urgent support.

Front-line case workers need to visit several seniors to provide different services everyday. The shift and service details always keep changing. They had to check the updated schedule everyday on a paper posted in the NGO center.

previous service task schedule

02. The information of each case need to be better archived, centralized and shared among employees.

Professionals and front-line case workers may work for the same service users. However, the information for each service cannot be easily shared among all. They need to specifically ask each other to get the updates when needed.

employees used whatsapp to update each other, making it hard to retrieve
scattered documents cannot be shared efficiently

03. Manual paper works is not efficient and leads to mistakes

Previously, the whole workflow, from clock-in, clock-out to recording updates and marking transportation cost, were done manually, which takes large amount of time and often brings about mistakes.

journey mapping

To create a holistic design solution, we created users' journey based on interview and mapped pain points and design values onto the journey. By doing so, we could re-evaluate the design concept and features holistically, and make sure that all of users' goals can be achieved, their pain points can be relieved and unnecessary features can be avoided.

Design Concept

A mobile application that empowers professionals & care workers to work more efficiently and collaboratively through:

Effective Schedule Display
Information
Re-configuration
Streamlined Workflow

Service Schedule (Landing Page)
Have a picture of what today be like
Read the district codes first to easier arrange today’s route

Service Details
Get updates from the last shift
Learn to execute service with ease

Bulletin
Learn about the case’s latest condition from different professionals’ perspectives

Service Users' Health Record
Find out the abnormal condition easily

information architecture

To make sure the design is not only aligned with users needs, but also aligned with business vision and technological feasibility, we went through several rounds of critique and feedback collections on the IA with the client and engineer team.

complete ia
prototyping, Testing & iteration

Due to the tight schedule and sudden changes of functional requirement from the client, we adjusted the prototyping strategy. We conducted two rounds: 1st round to test look & feel using mock-ups, 2nd round to test the interaction and functionality using mid-fi interactive prototypes.

for clientele - service schedule
accessibility testing

We also conducted A/B test and accessibility testing for the senior users to test the layout, font, size, color, contrast and ease of navigation.

for seniors - first version
for seniors - final version
final ui - clientele app


key screens
impact

Employees have improved their work efficiency and the NGO was able to accommodate more service users. Since its launch, over 300 seniors have been enrolled the new service, the number of which was increased by around 30% compared to before.

Media Press
"The online system helps the elderly to live infinitely in the rehabilitation epidemic without leaving home". Hong Kong Commercial Daily. Apr 20, 2020.

"The 90-year-old elderly plays games to improve the cognitive abilities". Apple Daily. Mar 23, 2020.

Service Users (The Seniors)

01. Content Not Data

Lack of motivation for life is a more serious concern for them rather than their physical health condition. Compared to health data, a more pressing need for the elderly is to find ways to spend time in engaging and quality content and activities, boosting self-esteem and feeling connected.

02. Single Path Design

Since some of the service user are around 80 years old already. They cannot handle a complex path to complete the task. Therefore, we should narrow down the number of choice and give the best solution for them.

03. Accessibility

Most of the service users have presbyopia already. Therefore, we need to find out which font size is the most suitable for them.

for front-line care worker and professionals
A tool that provides more effective schedule display, streamlined workflow and a more collaborative and efficient information experience.
full set ui
persona - Physio-therapist
persona - nurse
persona - social worker
persona - coordinator

Caregiver (Family Member)

01. Lack of engagement

Usually being busy and away from the elderlies, family members still want to feel a sense of connection with the elderlies

03. Instant update

Since living in different places, family members need a way to monitor the elderly's health condition and get updated whenever there is any incident.

persona - caregiver
Project Goal

Empower client's employees to work more efficiently and