Digital Assistant for Aged Care Carers
The digital assistant buddy was conceptualised as a response to a brief by my manager, where he needed to pitch a tech-focused idea he had in mind to leadership. My role in this project was to ground the team and ensure we were addressing real customer and staff problems.
01
The Brief
As a designer, I often receive enthusiastic, ambiguous briefs. As a first step, I take it upon myself to reframe the problem (as part of my human-centred process) so that the outcome is fit for purpose and has real value for the end-user.
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For this particular brief, my manager came to me with an idea of a digital concierge for all Uniting staff; frontline and back-office. Additionally, the analogous experience he used was thinking about a shopper going into a shopping mall and needing assistance from the front desk on where to find certain things.
02
Understanding the problem
My next step was to understand what were the gaps and challenges that staff, particularly frontline, were facing. Furthermore, I needed to validate the assumption that frontline were struggling to look for information or anything at all.
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The turnaround time for this concept was only a few days and at the time, access to customer data was limited/not accessible.
I took matters on my own hands and conducted a user interview with a frontline carer to legitimatise (at least for this stage of the process) the concept.
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I pulled together a view of a 'day in the life' and was able to extrapolate very real and insightful challenges by the carer themselves who was also culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD).
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Current challenges:
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Language barriers (ESL)
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Uncertainty
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Time poor (too much admin, and not enough time to assist the residents)
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Inability to find the right info at the right time
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03
The Reframed Problem
Upon gaining further understanding of the user, I formulated a hypothesis and a HMW statement as a starting point for the project and as a way to frame the entire concept effectively.
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HMW
How might we provide all Uniting employees (frontline, back-office etc) continuous support and enablement in their roles throughout their time at Uniting, to ultimately serve our residents with the utmost quality and care?
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The Hypothesis ​
We know that Uniting employees today are time poor and challenged by the many disjointed systems that support their tasks & training. They're left with the inability to locate information at the right time to complete work and ultimately unable to provide the care and attention to Uniting customers
So we believe a front-door smart assistance experience that allows employees shortcut access to information at the point of need
Will empower employees the control and independence to self-serve
And enable efficiency & accuracy of tasks; swift responses to emergencies; adherence to our Uniting values & care processes; and most importantly, promotion of the well-being of our customers and fellow employees
04
High-level user flow
I illustrated a high level screen flow (collaborated with users and stakeholders to help provide valid scenarios) for both frontline and staff. This concept was presented to leadership. Other things to note: a key technical constraint was that we needed link users off to existing systems (the business already had a partnership with this vendor) and we needed to consider GenAI.
