Care.com is a marketplace for families and caregivers to match based on things such as pay, schedule, and quality of care. I worked on a team focused on the caregiver experience, focused on helping them improve their chances of finding a job on our platform. I should note that my team was solely responsible for the entire caregiver experience (exactly half of the product), one which has largely been neglected for many years.
The MHP, or Member Home Page, is a webpage that is the hub for users, and it is the place to which all other pages are connected. Our team of a PM, a marketer, a UX writer, a lead developer, and a designer (me), worked closely together to not just "re-skin" the current page, but also to address some major user pain points and improve a few key metrics. Some key metrics we were focused on:
I took some notes on some low-hanging fruit for improving the MHP before workshopping with my team. Here are some big takeaways.
Some of our early explorations into the minds of our users included making empathy maps, like below. In addition to making these, we regularly interviewed our users, created user tests on Usertesting.com, surveyed our members to gain quantitative data, and read Appstore reviews (and other forms of user feedback) daily. Additionally, we ran a 2-week diary study, followed by making a detailed user journey/persona using our findings.
As a team, we came together to help develop hypotheses for how to improve the MHP page. Some design exercises we did included:
When coming up with a completely new structure for a page, it is extremely important to consider how the IA is going to be restructured and displayed.
When restructuring the IA, you have to consider not only where the page links will live, but what information you are surfacing "above the fold".
By doing this exercise, we could estimate what components of the page users would engage most with, and also make sure users could navigate to important pages very easily.
User testing feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Some users who had been previous Care.com members vowed to return to the site after going on hiatus for several years. In general, people thought the information on the page was extremely useful, clear, and informative. To our frustration, a lot of the metrics we tracked came out flat, if not slightly negative. However, one clear positive metric emerged.
The number of people requesting and receiving reviews on the platform increased by 17% on desktop and 45/30% on mobile web.
Although a lot of metrics came out flat or negative, I would still consider this project a huge success for a number of reasons.
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