Case Study: Homepage improvement for home personal care mobile apps

Note: This is a personal case study, not used in any business or company

Homage is an award-winning personal care solution that combines curated and trained care professionals with smart technology to manage and provide on-demand holistic home and community-based caregiving to seniors and adults, allowing them to age and recover with grace, control, and dignity. As a leading care services provider, Homage’s core services include Care Assessments, Activities of Daily Living (ADL) assistance, Home Nursing Procedures, Home Rehabilitation services, including Physiotherapy, Speech Therapy, and Occupational Therapy, as well as Home Medical services. Operating in Singapore, Malaysia, and Australia, Homage works with care recipients with a range of mobility and medical conditions, including chronic and terminal illnesses such as Dementia, Stroke, Parkinson’s, and cancer, helping them be more mobile and functional as well as providing social and personal care. Homage has previously collaborated with government, health, and financial organizations to distribute and deliver home — and community — caregiving services. Visit homage to know more about the services.

Background and problem

As a business, Homage has a problem to solve. Especially related to home personal care service and with the Care Professional (CP) and Care Owner (CO/Client). After the service, CP will provide CO the Care Recipient with a visit summary. CO is able to give reviews as feedback of the service from CP, but as per data only 31% of completed visits receive reviews and furthermore, 91% of submitted reviews are star ratings only, without text explanation.

Pain points for user

1. CO is not motivated to submit a review
2. CO is not guided to submit specific feedback

Pain points for Homage

1. Homage has low visibility over customer satisfaction & CP due to limited reviews
2. If reviews are too high level, then the information is not actionable in terms of CP coaching and optimization of assigning an appropriate CP for CO’s expectation

As a Product Designer, I will try to help Homage to solve this problem and give the solutions.

Business goals

1. Maximize the number of visit reviews submitted by each CO
2. Capture more meaningful & actionable information within each review

How to do it?

1. Try to understand, analyze & define problems from the user side
2. Try to understand why users don’t want to give a review
3. Try to understand what kind of services and reviews users want
4. Try to give alternative solutions and mobile app improvement for Homage

Let me introduce you to Homage user

Carla, 29 years old, is a senior accountant at a company in Singapore. Her father died 3 years ago due to a heart attack, and currently, Carla lives with her elderly mother, Martha, 59-years old, and also with her 21-year-old brother Sam.

After the death of her father, Carla now acts as a leader of her family and provided for all the needs of the family. She will give her best, especially for her Mom’s health who has diabetic issues. Together with Sam, they take care of their Mom.

His life is dynamic and he spends a lot of time in the office, so does her brother who is still in his last stage of diploma study. So sometimes she need help from an expert to take care of her mother’s health, and Carla uses Homage personal care service to help her.

Services that Carla use

During Carla and Sam’s busy times, She uses Home Personal Care services, especially the Elderly Care section to help take care of her mother. A few of the things Carla needed are:

1. Helping her mother to take a bath, take a dress and feed her mom.
2. Help to check her mother’s health, starting from blood preassure, heart rate, body temperature, checking diabetic rate, and weekly health check.
3. Help to give medicine for her.
4. Become a friend to talk with her mother.

And all of those needs can be helped by the Homage service and now Carla always repeats orders from the CP to help her.

Here, I talk to her and got her feedback and preferences about the services, especially about the problem with the review page and rating page.

Feedback related with review page and rating page

1. To see the recent section, the user must scroll to the bottom of the page, not visible in the first fold.
2. Inside the card, too much focus on it, all of the features, even the feedback part doesn’t get any attention for me, for Carla, view report and request again be the main focus in the card.
3. The section to give rates is easy to reach with her thumb, but the main focus of the page is to see the details of the visit and comments from CP.
4. Understand that this page is used to provide feedback, but for Carla to give a star is enough, moreover, it is quite difficult for her to put together what words can be written for feedbacks.

Feedback for the apps

Assumptions and Best practice

After getting information from the user, I tried to write down some of the assumptions to know the product and service better. The assumptions also will come up with the idea to improve it, I will use the term best practice.

Assumptions

Understand that users can still find the recent order via the activity menu, but I realize that if users can’t find the recent on the 1st fold, it makes users don’t aware of their recent or even to do rating via recent card. Visibility on the 1st fold can give more awareness about giving a rating, especially can find a way to make the card neater.

Best practice

We can simplify the homepage, first in the 6 features section, currently, the menu composition is 3 rows and 2 columns, we can change it to 2 rows and 3 columns. Hopefully with fewer rows on the front page, making the recent section moved to the top

1st assumption

Assumptions

All information in the card can be seen and understood by the user who reads it. But, I see, there are some things that can be simplified. The use of writing dates, names, photos, and times that are too large and also in accordance with feedback from Clara, the focus of the card is more on view report and request again, simplification of cards can make information more efficient also can make the user aware about giving rate

Best practice

1. Try to simplify the card.
2. Try different approaches for link CTA.
3. Try to make the rating star more visible.

2nd assumptions

Assumptions

Based on the current position, the review section can be easily seen and accessed, but the question is how to maximize the review position so that it attracts the attention of the user to give the score.

Best practice

1. Try to put the rating in another position, maybe can put it around the CP name and profile photo.
2. Try to use different shapes for rating, emoji can be an option.
3. Give rating results around the CO profile section, so will add more affection to the user to interact with them to give a rating.

3rd assumptions

Assumptions

Users seem lazy to give written reviews because they feel it is enough to just give stars. Besides that, like the example story from Carla, She is quite confused to write a review because there is no guide or inducement for it. In addition, can analyze whether it is necessary to provide 2 text fields for review (1 for CP and 1 privately for Homage) or maybe can hide first for Homage private review.

Best practice

1. Same as previous feedback can try to use emoji to give a rating to CO.
2. Give default feedback that users can choose first.
3. Try to use simple and friendly copy to attract users more.
4. Hide the private feedback first, so the page doesn’t look full enough with a text field.
5. If the user gives a bad score, can give follow-up questions to make sure about the issue.

4th assumptions

Flows and screens

User flow from homepage and Activity page

For this stage imagine the user has completed the service and can see the recent order or go to the activity page.

Prototype idea

To explore the prototype, you can access it via these links

Prototype 1

Prototype 2

Explanation Prototype 1

Explanation Prototype 2

Pro and Cons option 1

1. With the change from the Get Care position, all the features at the bottom can move up, but in the Get Care options itself, it will look smaller, the text part for example, especially for users with small screens such as iPhone SE and Android.
2. I changed the position of recent and especially for the card and information inside it. Need to check to users do they understand it or not.
3. Current users know to rate the CP can be accessed on the bottom of the page, but now I moved it to the top, for current users maybe that thing can make them confused.
4. Right now, I tried to hide the private comment, it’s different from the current one that users can see in the 1st fold comment section.

Pro and Cons option 2

1. Same with option 1, the change from the Get Care position, all the features at the bottom can move up, but in the Get Care options itself, it will look smaller, the text part for example, especially for users with small screens such as iPhone SE and Android.
2. Inside the card, now I just use the icon to see the report and request again, need to check with real users do they understand about it or not.
3. Emoji also maybe will be a new thing to user, need to introduce it to the user
4. Right now, I tried to hide the private comment, it’s different from the current one that users can see in the 1st fold comment section.

Apart from that, need to validate this prototype via A/B testing or UT to the real user to know the feedback about the new idea of Homage mobile apps.

Others

What kind of user feedback should the Care Owner receive?

From a user perspective maybe they need some kind of feedback that they want to see/read on the review, such as:

1. Health feedback (Blood preassure, heart rate, temperature, current health condition, nurse observation report)
2. Situation and condition report.
3. Additional custom note from Care Pro.
4. If got something urgent, CO also needs proof via photo.

What is the ideal solution vs what is the MVP?

Honestly, it’s hard for me to decide the ideal solution or MVP for this project before talking to the PM side to know their point of view or even before doing Usability Testing to check the prototype to the real user. But, the thing that I want to fix from the current prototype is to make sure the recent cards can be more visible to users like my 1st and 2nd design that I moved to the top.

Others design direction or improvement from me

I want to share a few things that I consider when I play along with Homage apps.

1. In the future, maybe can consider about give a tooltip introduction for new users like me to help me understand the apps better.
2. Does Homage still need a hamburger menu on the apps, especially for ios? Maybe can try to put the information inside the profile section that users can access via profile photo
3. Can also add info vaccinated status to CP worker, to make sure about user protection
4. I check about primary color especially when using it inside the CTA, I’m not sure is it the correct color or not (#32BCC6) but if correct, need to make sure again about this color, because when I checked it to color contrast checker, the color didn’t pass the test.

Other feedbacks related the apps

That’s about it and that’s all my research process to improve Homage mobile apps. Feel free to contact me and I would love to present my idea and concept about this.

Lourenchyus Alfredo, Product Designer — Connect with me via Linkedin