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How can we attract and hire more caretakers?

We decided our first quick win would be to create a paperless hiring process - from finding the job, to applying, to onboarding. This made sense to me because:

1. We needed it in order to scale quickly

2. I could spend more time doing a deep dive into our user needs to inform any solutions for improving caretaker job satisfaction instead of guessing

But first, to ensure all of our teams were building towards the same goal, I created a service map that showed what touchpoints we would need at the internal, direct support professional, and client levels for hiring and improving overall job satisfaction.

I invited directors of engineering, technical product management, and product managers across the organization to question, communicate, and fill in gaps across our service levels.

This served two purposes:

1. As the backbone for future conversations about user experience across Circulo.

2. To visually align the team on what was coming next and what developers would be working on

How can we find and solve caretaker pain points to increase job satisfaction?

We needed to understand what problems Direct Support Professionals (DSPs) face in their day-to-day roles and find ways to solve those problems to improve overall job satisfaction and decrease employee turnover.

Research Goals

• Learn about direct support professionals (DSPs) and who they are as people

• Determine what information is needed for interested people to understand and then apply to become a direct support professional

• Understand what happens in the day to day work life of a DSP

• Discover the touchpoints between a DSP and managers, individuals, county workers, medical professionals, and so on

• Uncover how DSPs learn about their client and track information about their client

Applications for these learnings

• Pain point and opportunity identification

• Feature creation and prioritization

• Figure out what we don't know and what we need to know more about

• Learn how to increase interest in the field from folks in other fields or fresh graduates

• Decrease churn

To get at these questions, I planned out the research with our UX Researcher, Jake, and we split the tasks.

We learned quickly from SME interviews conducted by the core team that DSPs read from and write in a large binder, kept at the client's house. This binder contains paper sheets that DSPs use to keep track of client information, such as weight, bowel movements, and food intake. It also contains the client's Individualized Service Plan (ISP), a large document that averages around 50-70 pages containing information about the client's background, health, family members, goals, risks, behaviors, and so on.

Now that I had a better understanding of DSPs and their needs, I stared drafting wireframes for a landing page that would lead into the application. I elected to do this alongside the data synthesis in order to maintain momentum and enable Circulo Homes to scale quickly.

The interviews and literature review indicated that my design should:

• Be mobile-first because DSPs only have access to smartphones

• Explain what a DSP is and use clear language

• Show how we're different from other places

• Be transparent about pay and hiring process

My PM, Bill, took care of the applicant tracking system, where we used active campaign to keep track of applicants moving through the hiring process, Gusto for onboarding, and asked me for help and feedback as needed. Meanwhile, I worked with our designer, Tim, as he created the Hi-Fis from my Lo-Fis.

Synthesis continued while readying launch of the DSP job application.

In addition to creating personas, which I worked on with our user researcher, Jake, I also created illustrative storyboards that summarized our day-in-the-life DSP research.

I presented these storyboards to our larger maker group, with other stakeholders and adjacent teams, to ensure that everyone can see, visually, what DSPs do, how our solutions can change their lives, and why it matters.

I continued to reference and share these artifacts as the team moved forward in the design of our projects, namely the caretaker app.

A top-down decision to focus on Circulo Homes as the #1 go-to-market for Circulo meant that I needed to:

1. Get the company up to speed on our team's research

2. Set the course for product vision

Using findings from the research, I presented a fictional story that followed Doug's journey to Circulo Homes and Sheryl's journey to becoming his DSP, showing how our business and new tools would simplify these paths. These new illustrations helped foster shared understanding across the company about the way forward.

-Sean Lane, CEO, after presenting illustrations to the full company

Now that we had enabled growth through our DSP application, synthesized research insights, and onboarded new departments, it was time to flesh out the caretaker app, specifically the Individualized Service Plan (ISP), the book of supports, activities, and so on required for meet a client's life goals.

To generate design ideas using our research, I planned and facilitated a design sprint for our PMs, researcher, and front-end developer.

The design sprint revolved around the question: How might we make digital ISPs easy and useful for DSPs?

• The Design Sprint included:

• Lightening Interviews with SMEs / Research refresh

• Grouping themes from the interviews

• Creating How Might We's

• Creating sprint questions

• Drawing the map and selecting a focus

• Concept sketching within the focus

Based on the diary study, we knew that DSPs most often checked the ISP for information about their client's risks and behaviors, like for example, a swallowing risk. So we zoomed in on how best to surface this information.

The team agreed that the best path forward for putting information about a DSP's client in their hand was through a native app. We settled on three concepts to move forward with, including a button chat bot, which I considered to be our dark horse concept - AKA, a concept that we knew had low odds of performing well but that I knew we could learn from.