Honor Home Care
Company Overview
Honor is a home care company that helps families find caregivers for their elderly loved ones. These caregivers, called Care Pros, use the Honor mobile app to find shifts, view their schedule, prepare for visits, and communicate with Honor staff.
One component of the app that I worked on was a feature called Care Notes.
Care Notes
Care Notes are short reports written by the Care Pro after each visit with a client. They are written primarily for the families of the client so they can know how the visit went, but are also visible to other Care Pros who work with that client. These Care Notes provide a history of care that is useful for future visits.
Problem
The quality of Care Notes varies widely. Some are extremely detailed play-by-play accounts of how the visit went, and others are as brief as: "Today was a normal visit." Longer, thoughtful care notes are more useful to both the families and other Care Pros. The overarching question we asked ourselves was:
How can we encourage Care Pros to write better Care Notes?
We decided to build a simple way to recognize high-quality notes, with a few goals in mind.
Goals
Engagement with other CP's care notes
We wanted CPs to know that others were reading (and appreciating) their notes. We also saw this as a start to provide more community features to the app, to allow Care Pros to feel more connected with each other.
Increased quality of care notes
We wanted to subtly incentivize Care Pros to write more thoughtful and substantive notes. If a Care Pro receives recognition from a peer for a well-written note, they are more likely to continue to write good notes.
Solution
I worked with the product manager to design a way for Care Pros to interact with each others' written notes. This solution was comprised of 3 main components:
  • Care Pros will be able to mark others' Care Notes as helpful.
  • Care Pros that receive a helpful mark will be notified.
  • The names of the Care Pros marking a Care Note helpful will be displayed under each Care Note.
Role
I worked as the product designer on this feature, along with 1 product manager and 3 engineers. Throughout the development of this feature, I brought ongoing iterations to the larger product design team for critique, and ultimately presented to the VP of product for approval.
Responsibilities
  • Research
  • Interaction design
  • Visual design
  • Copywriting
  • Handoff and testing
Explorations
Early options
Initial explorations for marking a care note included stars, upvotes, and hearts.
"Helpful" button options
We found that using a button with the word "Helpful" aligned most closely with our goals for this feature. Here are several variations of this approach.
Finished Designs
Marking a Care Note as helpful
1: The Care Pro reads a Care Note...
2: ...and marks it as helpful.
3: Other interaction scenarios
In-app Notifications and First-Time UX
A notification in the content feed
Tapping through to the Care Note
First-time UX shown to users upon update
Considerations
Throughout the process of designing Helpful Care Notes, I had to consider many different factors that would impact the product and the UX. Here are a few of those considerations:
Urgency of Notifications
Care Pros already receive different notifications through the Honor app. These include job offers, clock-in/clock-out reminders, and schedule updates that are imperative to their work. When designing the Helpful Care Notes feature, we had to consider how to let users know that someone found their Care Note helpful, without bombarding them with push notifications that would become annoying or distracting.
The solution we decided on was to have these notifications appear only in the content feed of the app, and not as push notifications. Furthermore, in order to avoid cluttering the content feed, we display on the five most recent Helpful Care Note notifications. Any subsequent notification will replace the oldest one.
Designing for Different Types of Users
Our data showed us that most clients have multiple Care Pros caring for them, which meant that in most cases, there would be at least one other Care Pro reading a given Care Note. But what about clients that only have one Care Pro caring for them? How would the product look to these Care Pros? Would we have to design two separate versions of the product?
In the end, we were able to design the feature in such a way that worked for both types of users. We made it so that a Care Pro cannot mark their own Care Notes as helpful, so the feature would be completely invisible to Care Pros that don't share a given client.
Displaying a List of Names
One interesting challenge was figuring out how to display the list of Care Pros who found a Care Note helpful. We considered a separate screen listing out the names and profile pictures of Care Pros, but ultimately decided this was not the right approach for a couple of reasons:
1) The average number of Care Pros marking a Care Note would be quite small, so it wouldn't warrant a dedicated screen to display this information.
2) There is currently no profile feature for individual Care Pros in the app. Showing a vertical list of names and avatars implies being able to tap through to more content. This could be a direction to explore in the future, but it didn't make sense for the first iteration of this feature.
In the end, we decided to simply list the names of the Care Pros next to a thumbs-up button with a counter, as seen in the right screen above.