Herewith

TIMELINE

2021 - 2023

PLATFORMS

Android, iOS, Web

CATEGORIES

Eldercare, Health

RESPONSIBILITIES

Core UX, Strategy, User Research

As a Senior Product Designer at Herewith, I lead the app’s core experience design to match families with caregivers along with tools to coordinate care and manage payments.

I’ve worked at Herewith since its inception and conducted the foundational, generative and evaluative research that led to our solution today. Herewith launched its service to the public in March 2023 is ready to find you care.

CARE SERVICES 🤝🏠

Finding care for an older adult is a long and difficult process. Families generally take on the responsibility of care at this stage often requiring a great deal of physical/emotional load. They soon burn out and start looking for external assistance a.k.a caregivers. These caregivers work inside their homes and interact intimately with their loved ones for long hours bringing up concerns around trust, personality and affordability.

Herewith bridges this gap by providing families with caregivers in the area who can work shifts for however long they’d like. Caregiver’s can set their own hourly rate, availability and get a suite of benefits by joining the platform. A dedicated support team assists families in finding the best match with a caregiver.

Post a Job

Families can create a job listing for caregivers to view. The job listing consists of different attributes that caregivers look for. Examples of these include location, budget, start date, schedule, description of the older adult, and care needs. This information then gets sent to greenhouse as a job post. Caregivers use this information when deciding whether to apply or interview for this job.

Browse Caregivers

After creating their account, families can browse through a list of caregivers in their area. Finding caregivers closest was important to most families as well as caregivers apart from being trustworthy and affordable. By default, these caregivers are sorted by distance, but families can switch the sorting options to price and experience as well. Each profile displays key information about each caregiver like distance, experience, rate along with a video profile.

Caregiver Video Profiles

Since personality is a key concern for families, caregivers have the ability to upload video profiles. When caregivers create their profile, they can upload a video of them answering a simple question - “What do you love the most about caregiving?”. Answering this question will help families assess the personality of a caregiver much better than a static profile picture. Having a video profile, increases the likelihood of caregivers getting hired.

COORDINATION TOOLS 🛠💬

Care involves different activities of daily living throughout the shift. These can become hard to keep track of on a weekly or daily basis. Lack of communication between families and their caregivers also causes major rifts in the care provided to an older adult. Usually this kind of communication and management is done via chatting apps, spreadsheets or just on the phone. To alleviate these issues and maintain alignment, customers can use our tasking and journalling features.

Tasking

Families or caregivers can add and assign tasks to members of the care team. Members of the team can go in and complete these tasks as and when appropriate. Tasks can also be set of different recurring cadences - weekly/daily.

Journalling

Members of the care team can also write journal entries on the app for members to view and chat about. These entries can range from incidents that occur to joyful moments that take place during this time of care and can be tagged as ‘Important’. All entries are sorted by most recent to oldest.

SHIFTS & PAYMENTS 💸⏱

Caregivers are basically gig-workers. They take multiple clients or multiple jobs and often jump ship for a slightly better pay resulting in a high caregiver turnover rate. Herewith wants all caregivers who sign up to set their own rates and get paid what they are owed accurately. To that extent, we’ve built shift tracking features and partnered with trusted payment vendors ensuring timely receipt of paychecks.

Shift Tracking

With the Herewith app, caregivers can log their work hours and submit them for review. Families can also dispute worked hours and request for corrections where necessary. This ensures transparent and accountable caregiving schedules, with real-time updates, shift history, and notifications for both caregivers and families, simplifying coordination and payment tracking while fostering trust and clarity in the relationship.

AutoPay / Vendor Integration

Families can take advantage of a convenient weekly autopay feature, partnering with trusted payment vendors. With this, caregivers receive prompt compensation for their services, automating the payment process. Families can set up hassle-free payments, enhancing the overall caregiving experience and reducing administrative burdens.

REFLECTION

At Herewith, I learned about designing and building product from zero. Identifying business opportunities with foundational research into the space and narrowing down the focus to 2 major spaces was critical in this process. I realized the sheer magnitude of impact that user & market research plays in the definition of a scope and guiding investment perspectives.

I like to think of the ‘double diamond of UX’ as an exhilarating & intellectual hike that one can take at an organization. The scale of these hikes change with the scope and nature of the project being worked on.