Care Connext

Supporting and maintaining caregivers’ mental health and wellness with comprehensive self-care services

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‍Background

‍According to the U.S. Census Bureau's Population Projections, the number of Americans ages 65 and older will nearly double what it was in 2018 from 52 million to 95 million by 2060, many of whom will likely require the assistance of a caregiver. Caregiving is an undeniably important role, but one that often leaves attendants overworked, under-valued, under-compensated, and feeling the physical and emotional tolls of the job. Not only do caretakers put their lives aside to help others, they're also expected to handle it with grace and usually left to figure it out alone.

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‍Objectives + Goals

‍Research and design a prototype that improves the life of a caregiver. My team's goal was to empower caregivers to be more proactive, persistent, and patient at their job while improving their mental health and wellbeing.

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Timeline: August 2021 (6 days)

‍Role: UX Designer + Researcher

‍Courses + Instructors: Intro to Design Thinking, Sketching for Communication, Eliciting & Inspiring Participant Data; 3D Prototyping

Team: Emily Yan, Blake Smith, Nikhil Mahadevan, Rachel Ancar

‍Skills: Brand Identity, Visual Design, Research Planning, User Research, Synthesis, Ideation, Prototyping, User Testing, Personas, Storytelling

‍Tools: Miro, Box, Zoom, Adobe Illustrator, Google Slides, found objects

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Design Process

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RESEARCH

Understanding the emotional and physical stress of caregiving

The first part of our 6-day design challenge was to figure out which area of a caregiver's life we wanted to help improve. After creating a mind map of caregiving responsibilities and uncovering that many of the struggles caregivers face often boiled down to not having enough time to take care of themselves, my team decided to focus primarily on mental health and wellness.

To test our assumptions, we prepared a list of questions and recruited two caregivers to conduct remote interviews with. Our first research participant was Mary, a baby boomer who takes care of her 90-year-old mother, and Mark, a millennial who previously provided care for his friend with mobility issues while he was in college.

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Although our research participants and their circumstances were different, there were three main themes shared between both interviewees:

they had to assume their role as a caregiver very unexpectedly and with little to no resources
they felt caretaking took a toll on their mental health
they felt overworked and had to "wear a lot of hats"

This led us to form our main insight, which denotes that when people become caregivers (especially for loved ones), the dynamics of their relationship with those they provide care for can shift in unique ways. We realized that caregivers need to be taken care of too, and we wanted to design ways to empower them to take care of themselves and set them up for success so they can continue providing quality care to others.

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IDEATION

Creating the Caregiver's Self-Care & Mental-Health Toolkit

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After gaining insights from our interviews and uncovering common themes between the contrasting interviewees' experiences in caregiving, we established the design criteria for our prototype and began ideating on a variety of concepts.

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Our design must:

enable caregivers to feel fulfilled, gratified, and confident in their caregiving abilities;
provide caregivers intuitive ways for finding and maintaining support systems available to them; and
help them embrace unfavorable health outcomes while fostering a healthy state of mind

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PROTOTYPING + USERTESTING

Walking a Mile in a Caregiver's Shoes

Caregivers come from all kinds of backgrounds with different needs and preferences, which we wanted to account for in our designs by offering both digital and analog options.

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After several rounds of rapid ideation, we ended up creating a variety of lo-fidelity prototypes to showcase to our class. We provided our classmates each a caretaker persona and had them run through the experience through that lens to test how accessible our offerings were and if they were easy to understand. Being able to have 20+ people test our prototypes early on provided a plethora of feedback on how we could make our product offerings even better.

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Reflections + Next Steps

What happened afterwards?

Did you solve the problem?

If so, how do you know?

Was a new version planned?

Did it inspire another project?

What, if anything, are the next steps for the project?

What did you learn from doing this project?

What went well/was effective?

What challenges did you face and how did you deal with them?

What could've gone better or been done differently?

What do you do differently now as a result?

What could be improved for future iterations?

What might you try next time? What was missing?

How did this project inform your growth/perspective as a designer?

What was the best part of this project for you?

Where was your joy, engagement, or spark?

Anything unique worth mentioning about this project?

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