2021

How conversational AI meets human to care for caregivers

Overview
Coco (Care for caregivers) is an on-demand health support platform for those that are caring for someone with chronic illness. Caregivers can access the professional therapy services (Problem Solving Therapy- PST) via the empathetic chatbot 24/7, and caregiving resources to those that are caring for someone with chronic health condition.
My role
Responsible for the end to end discovery, user research, interaction design and visual design of all the features for the product's Beta release
Team
1 UX Designers (me)
3 UX Researchers
3 Developers
Team stakeholders
Problem statement
Caring for an aging parent, a child or other loved ones with a chronic conditions is stressful, yet the caregivers seldom take time to acknowledge and address their own health needs. How might we help provide the nonprofessional caregivers with the needed health resource and skills?
PERSONA
Who are the caregivers?
PERSONA
Who are the caregivers?
PAINPOINTS
What do they have in common?

Caregivers are always under stress

Caring for someone with chronic illness means constant worry. When care-recipients need them, it’s right now. Thus, they can only fit in small amount of self-care while multi-tasking on caregiving tasks

Caregivers are always busy

The caregiving tasks are usually very complex and have a highly unpredictable schedule. The wide range of tasks (tedious appointment booking, emailing and calling; coordinating with social workers, health-care professionals etc) keep them extremely busy.

Caregivers overlook their own needs

Because caregivers centered around their loved ones and especially the care recipients. They often times depend their own health and happiness on their loved ones. Even when they are burnt out, they feel guilt to reach out (dilemma or reaching out)

Caregivers are socially isolated

Caregiving burdens cause extra stress and feelings of isolation and  exclusion from their community. “I mean nobody is really going to step up and do caregiving tasks so it’s kind of just me”

User Needs
So, what do caregivers need the most?

Safe place to vent

With all the stress and anxiety accumulated in head, caregivers mostly just need a place to vent: "i just want to get it out of my chest"; without putting the negative affect into someone else's head.

Trustworthy resources

Users complain about "missing images interrupt my eye as I scan through" and the whole product has lots of labels with empty values.

Recognition and reaffirmation

“I dont always know why certain results are returned, or the ranking method or where results will take me, e.g. punchout to an external site, smart form to a form".

Assistance with structure

Users complain about "missing images interrupt my eye as I scan through" and the whole product has lots of labels with empty values.

Final Designs
Here is how Coco helps
The calming Today page with clear call to actions
Because caregivers centerd around their loved ones and espeically the care recipinets. They often times depend their own health and happiness on their loved ones. Even when they are burnt out, they feel guilt to reach out (dilemma or reaching out)
The solution tracker that  infuse implementation intention into users' life
Because caregivers centers around their loved ones and especially the care recipients. They often times depend their own health and happiness on their loved ones. Even when they are burnt out, they feel guilt to reach out (dilemma or reaching out)
Rich conversational UI that makes chatting soothing and efficient
Because caregivers centers around their loved ones and especially the care recipients. They often times depend their own health and happiness on their loved ones. Even when they are burnt out, they feel guilt to reach out (dilemma or reaching out)
Reflection
The art of decision making
This is the first project that I led a team. With the limited resources (we are all working part time for this project) , being able to quickly make a decision based on the current situation and move on feels more essential than ever.
To teach is to learn deeper
I was mentoring 3 student designers on several projects. This process forced me to think through my own design process and philosophy systematically because I need to clearly illustrate what I expect from them. This role switching experience further deepened my own understanding towards designs and teamwork.
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