Vida Care

Leading A Team

I had the opportunity to lead a team of 2 designers. This was a big step in my career and while I knew it would be tough, it also turned out to be extremely gratifying. As their manager, there were times to support and times to lead. It can be challenging to know when to do either, and how to find the balance between providing guidance whilst giving independence. Over time I saw their confidence growing and saw them taking control of their own path, nailing down the project direction. This alone, made the experience even more incredible.

Product Ownership

Key Responsibilities for project management:

• Planning a roadmap with stakeholders

• Understanding the business goals

• Understanding technical limitations

• Creating the acceptance criteria tickets for the developers

• Sprint planning (agile)

• Prioritising the developers backlog

• Keeping track of problems and promoting communication between teams

• Conducting meetings between teams

• Conducting training sessions for new team members

Challenges

• Consolidate the requests, needs and wants of stakeholders into a product that provides the best solution for the end user

• Maintaining a consistent and achievable roadmap, within a company that is growing and changing very rapidly

• Managing the expectations of our end users during our beta launch with an MVP

Design Process

Our design process is focused on streamlining our communication with the users and stakeholders enabling us to utilise our time more effectively and as result, empower the creativity of the design team. Establishing an organised hierarchy, outlining interactions for the specific features and understanding the steps the user would take, was essential to design a solution.

Competitor Analysis

A deep analysis of our strongest competitors showed that they have a big weakness when communicating with their users - we needed to fill this gap and make the user-centered design our main focus.

Brainstorm

Creative sessions, where different teams were strategically involved, were crucial to define the product’s direction.

Information Architecture

It’s vital to keep a record of the infrastructure of the product flows, functions, navigation, content and behaviour. So that when creating a new feature, this process allows a clear perception of the areas to be considered and strengthens the solution.
I made a structural document that identifies the main flows and functions of the BackOffice. This document identified the features dependencies and the effects on the mobile apps and portal. Using visual representations, it became an important cross-functional record of the core system. It was also necessary to draw in depth the structure that represents each functionalities.

Sketches

Sketches can be a fun way to validate an idea, promote communication and minimise risks. Because it’s a powerful way to promote creativity, it was an interesting step to go through with the designers, where they could explore the ´design thinking´ horizons. These drafts quickly verified whether the idea/solution crafted was indeed solving the problem we set forward to resolve.

Wireframes

Shaping the series of interactions between the user and the interface it’s a big transition. User journey flows help to map out all the different routes the user can go through to archive his goals. This is one of the most important phases of the design process, it’s where the first review of the product architecture is validated and consolidated.

UI

We’ve created a visual identity focused in attracting each of our users. It all started with a mood board, discovering shapes, animations, states, typography and colours. All the 3 products have different dynamics, so it was important to find distinctive but consistent language to give users the focus and the harmony needed to to perform daily routine actions.

User testing

InVision is a powerful tool that we’ve used to create our product prototypes. Depending on the design phase, we’ve presented the full spec or the specific feature to showcase to a group of users for a closer look, targeting different usability perspectives.
Validating information, navigation and features, helped us shape the product and boost it’s value.

Annotations

Annotations weren’t only a way of communicating with the developers but also a way to register user flows, justify ux decisions and clarify discussions within the team. It was also an important exercise for the designers to develop their soft and technical skills.

Training

I was responsible for conducting the training sessions to our end users: Carers, care coordinators, finance, care assessors and care managers. Before the launch, everyone had to have a session where the main features were presented and discussed.
We know how hard it is to memorise all the details, so we’ve made a guide enabling the BackOffice users to access further clarifications and sent an email to our carers with a recap of the main points.

Comparison with the most used care platform in the 1st month after the launch:

• A 76% reduction in shifts lateness

• A 50% improvement in time saved on Invoices

• A 32% improvement in time saved on carer payments

• Monitor client’s health condition report: 86% Same, 10% Better, 4% Worst

• The importance of how and why the collaboration between engineers and designers are critical in product development

• How to effectively communicate my thoughts, ideas and suggestions to the other team members

• Learnt how to approach design with development capabilities / limitations in mind

• How giving and soliciting feedback sets the team up for success

• Understanding the company’s mission and business objectives and knowing how to implement their value into the proposal

• Making and organising documentation about each feature and decision