jgunson

As the first full-time Product Designer at Birdie I researched and designed a suite of inter-connected tools; helped to develop a multi-platform design system; and lead a cross-functional team, all in pursuit of answering the following question:

Through technology, how might we enable care providers to deliver more efficient, effective and personalised care - improving the lives of older adults incrementally everyday?

A React Native mobile application used by 100,000s of Carers daily, allowing them to view their schedules, learn about their Clients, check in to visits, complete tasks, administer medication, and record observations.

I was responsible for designing a number of core features, alongside defining common components and patterns, all of which had to be incredbly easy to use and work offline on a range of devices.

A suite of features that allows Care Managers to view visit reports, respond to issues, take action and record outcomes - think messaging, tasks and reporting all rolled into one.

Working alongside another designer, we worked to re-design the features support to new event types, interactions and navigation. I then created a common set of patterns and components that could be used anywhere a live feed of information existed in our product.

Birdie was originally aimed at supporting informal Carers looking after loved ones 24/7, rather than home care providers, whose Carers visited Clients multiple times a day for short periods of time.

As such, our system was designed around sessions (e.g. medication scheduled to be taken on weekday mornings, a 6 hour period starting at 06:00) rather than visits (e.g. schedule medication to be given during the 09:30 → 10:30 visit on Monday morning).

This made it difficult for Care Managers to align medication and tasks with visits, leading to carers leaving medication unrecorded due to uncertainty around what was to be given and when.

During my first 2 years at Birdie we focused on building a product that would allow Care Managers to align tasks and medication with visits. However, managing visits and assigning Carers was done in a 3rd party system.

After speaking with Care Managers and observing them in their workplace, it quickly became clear that they struggled to manage two systems at once – it also took significant technical effort to make sure the integrations were reliable.

In early 2021, I was tasked with researching, designing and validating a set of features, which would allow Care Manages to manage visits and assignments in Birdie – helping them to perform more of their daily tasks in a single system, improving the UX, their processes and ultimately, the quality of care they could deliver.

During our work on Rostering, it became clear that Care Managers struggled with assigning multiple carers to visits over a number of weeks - a common requirement when planning care for a new client.

We initially tested a fully automated solution - allowing users to assign 1,000s of visits with the click of the button, however, Care Managers were skeptical that “a computer could do a better job than them” and "[it] wouldn't have all the info".

To address this concern and build trust in automation, I designed a flow that allowed Care Managers to edit the constraints the system used to make recommendations and then review/override the results before confirming - giving them greater control and comfort.

To improve the quality of suggestions in the Matching flow, we identified a need for Care Managers to control Client's preferences in terms of who cared for them.

Using a variety of filters, Care Managers were able to find and tag Carers that the Client preferred, decline those that weren't suitable and provide view access to those that were involved in assessing the care the Client received. These preferences would then be updated automatically using data collected from Clients and Carers through the app, following visits.

All of this information was then fed into the Matching process, providing for more relevant suggestions.

We developed functionality that allows Care Managers to manage Carer availability and absences within Birdie and reassign visits - previously they relied on a 3rd party system in combination with a separate Rostering system, which caused a number of issues, including missed/late visits.

Adding this into our system, ensured that only available carers were assigned to visits, increasing the agencies' fill rate (% of visits scheduled vs. completed).

I would have liked to explore the app experience prior to leaving, however, we validated that it could come in a later release.

The last piece of the Rostering puzzle was developing a finance system that allowed users to manage all the financial aspects of running a care business, including invoicing and payroll.

I was involved in the early exploration and validation, mapping out existing business processes, identifying requirements and defining the system UX.