01 Background In 2021, our team at Clarent (previously Bateau) revised our business strategy to help address a more current industry challenge. Initially, our product helped customers customers with compliance. However, we identified a critical issue with our customers' disparate resident care tools and systems. They were disorganized and lacked interoperability. This resulted in wasted time for staff, making tools work together and manually entering data from one system to another.
We had a smart solution: consolidate resident data into a centralized platform.
02 Defining the Product I teamed up with my Product Manager to brainstorm and we developed the primary goals:
Help senior living executives to reduce costs Help frontline staff in senior living communities to stay compliant Help give family members community residents transparency and peace of mind
The Timeline Concept I observed that Senior Living communities used multiple datapoints to care for their residents. Our hypothesis was that providing them with a real-time visualization that tied those datapoints together would provide a single source of truth which could decrease their time lost to extra work or errors.
I started researching timeline visualizations and generated some thinking for our timeline.
What is it? It combines multiple resident data streams into a timeline display, so that community staff can see and react to it. Events like medication administration, incidents, meal times, nutrition and recreational activities can all be viewed holistically. Staff can keep track of and respond to residents' needs quickly. They can also stay in sync across shifts as they hand off duties. Executive directors can maintain a history of activity for admin and compliance purposes.
Staff have the ability to perform contextual actions on the events in the timeline, getting them to their goals quicker. They can also layer their own notes and commentary on top of it. How does it work? Visual - It would be an axis showing time from left to right. Events and data would be represented as points-of-interest on the timeline.Granularity - Users should be able to manipulate the way events are shown on the timeline. The should be able to toggle between community-wide and resident specific events. They should also be able to adjust the how zoomed-in the timeframe was.Datapoints - Looking at the most common datapoints across many communities, I drafted the initial set of event types and started exploring the visual language around them.03 The First Timeline Event The Timeline concept was all about integrating our customers' data systems into a single stream. This would then allow us to populate events such as nurse calls, meals, medication administration and many more.
We realized however, that many processes were not yet digital and still relied on a pen-and-paper workflow. Staff in communities were filing paper forms for many types of events. These were very difficult to manage and keep track of.
As we spoke to more communities, one pen-and-paper workflow emerged as a particularly universal pain point. An Incident Report is a document recording any injury or serious events in Residents' lives in senior living. But the validation process behind it was very convoluted.
This seemed to be a perfect opportunity to build a workflow that could immediately demonstrate the value of our product, while addressing a very common pain point in our customers' lives.
Example of an Incident Report form The Form Journey The Incident Report form journey was very convoluted, but there was a clear bottleneck in the validation process. It seemed like an opportunity to simplify the process. We would achieve this by:
Digitizing IR forms - this would enable better distribution and record keeping of forms Making validation asynchronous - this would allow users to review and sign off on forms anytime, from anywhere Example Form Journey The Validation Workflow This new workflow could disrupt their standard operating procedure. So I knew we needed to get buy-in from communities that would have to actually implement it. Our product team met with a few partners and they were very receptive to making this part of their process digital.
From the product perspective, I saw this as the feature that would keep them comig back to the app. In the MVP, this would be the primary workflow to drive adoption.
Key Takeaway: Listening to users It's important to understand the past experiences of users in a problem space. In trying to learn this new industry, I kept an open mind to understand their unique challenges. Two key insights were: 1. Users had a negative sentiment toward new technology - we needed to always be open and listening to where they had experienced issues in the past 2. Users were busy - a simple experience was imperative Proposed Digital Validation Flow Form Iteration I reached out to customers to get as many different references and began to standardize the forms content. I then began design exploration on a new digital Incident Report form.
04 Developing the Interface After a few iterations, I conducted a final round of feedback sessions where I took our users through the form design and IR interactions. I received signoff and proceeded to building out the interface around the actual form.
Navigation & App Framework The next step was to build out the core app interface. I started by mapping out the user flow to visualize potential paths through the app.
MVP User Flow Lo-fi Mockups I introduced our team to using lo-fi mockups in place of typical wireframes for sketching out design ideas. Lo-fi mockups are an in-between of wireframes and hi-fi mockups that allows for quick iteration with higher levels of detail.
Navigation lo-fi's
MVP lo-fi's Testing Once I received internal validation for the lo-fi mocks, I created a prototype in Figma and conducted feedback sessions over zoom where I got input from our prospective users.
Review & Handoff I applied a couple rounds of feedback and then prepped the MVP design for handoff to our engineering team. I had a very collaborative workflow with our engineering team at the time, so handoff was more about communicating the granular specs. I kept engineering in the loop from early in the process so they had already seen and given feedback on the design.
05 Rollout After a couple of sprints, we rolled out the MVP of Resident 360 to our pilot communities. I prepped training materials and helped run training sessions over zoom with Executive Directors and other staff roles who would be using the app. This went smoothly and our users were very happy with the final product.
Post-Launch Challenges Despite a great initial response, a month after launch we noticed a steep drop-off in activity within the app.
After investigating the analytics, I suspected that users were struggling with integrating their computers into their workflow. Their jobs often had them on their feet and away from a computer, so the app was not conveniently with them in the moments they needed it.
The app was built to prioritize medium screens first. This included tablets and smaller laptops. We decided to give a few of our pilot users iPads to help them better use the app on-the-go. This was successful and we saw adoption increase and activity remain steady over the next few months. We then adjusted our messaging and education to showcase the app as a tablet-first tool.
06 Results After the MVP launch with the Incident Report even, we continued to design additional pen-and-paper features that fed into the Timeline including Alert Charting, 24 Hour Logs and Alert Lists.
We eventually expanded the app to integrate Sales and Ops data based on interest from our customers. A couple years later, we had served users across 22 senior living organizations, before transitioning them to the next evolution of our data platform.
