Wanda.care

Designing an “everything app” for elderly people

Time Frame

2023 - 2024

Scope

Product Design, Visual Design, User Research

Deliverables

UX Design (web/mobile), design system

Company

Wanda
MTM

I worked on Wanda while at MTM/Veyo, a transportation services company specializing in NEMT (non-emergency medical transportation). Rides to doctor’s appointments, pharmacy visits, dialysis treatments, and hospital discharges are a few examples that fall under the NEMT umbrella, with most services being covered by Medicare or Medicaid benefits.

To support these NEMT trips, the company built out a network of drivers and providers. With Wanda, our vision was to leverage this existing network and expand into an adjacent market: caregivers and their care recipients.

Our goal was to become a tool that caregivers could rely on to reduce their caregiving burden, offloading day-to-day tasks to a trained team that would go above and beyond services that weren’t designed to serve this specific segment of the population.

We aimed to consolidate the scattered array of apps and services that caregivers already used into a single, streamlined “everything app” - no more needing to login to a million different accounts.

On launch day, ride booking was available, with long term plans to offer other services, such as grocery/meal delivery, pet care, home improvement, and more.

Project Goals

Unlike existing rideshare apps like Uber and Lyft, Wanda was designed with the focus on elderly or mobility-impaired individuals, providing a more user-friendly experience specifically tailored to their unique needs and those of their caregivers. We came up with a few overarching goals that would be key to the product’s success.

1 Streamline & Centralize

Caregivers use a lot of different services, but there is no consistent experience. This fragmentation makes it hard to coordinate, especially if you are taking care of multiple people.

Pulling all of the services into one place will help reduce the administrative overhead, so the caregivers can focus their energy on care recipients.

Key Metric

Time to complete tasks from the dashboard, such as finding details for a specific upcoming ride

2 Make It Easy

Most caregivers are busy and overworked. The products and services that they use shouldn’t contribute to that.

Wanda should be quick and easy to use for all types of users, including those that may not be as technologically savvy.

Key Metric

Time taken to complete New User Registration + Time taken to book their first trip

3 Establish Trust (Early)

In order for a caregiver to use this product, they will need to trust that the Wanda team has got them covered.

One strategy for building that trust early is an intuitive product experience during the initial booking, leading up to the ride itself.

Key Metric

Percentage of New Registrations (where someone sets up their Wanda account with at least one service user) who take their first ride

Building Trust

Wanda supports caregivers managing the needs of older or medically challenged loved ones, a role requiring significant trust.

To build this trust, even before a user's first ride, we focused on designing a product that demonstrated our commitment to high-quality care. We conducted extensive user research to understand caregivers' workflows and created a service that reduces their workload without adding stress.

Based on these insights, we incorporated customization options to address diverse needs, distinguishing our product from one-size-fits-all solutions like Uber and Lyft. We also ensured consistent design patterns and visual elements across the platform to minimize cognitive load and provide a seamless, high-quality experience.

Process

With those goals in mind, the design team set out to identify the highest impact features that would make caregivers on the platform feel like the product was built specifically for them, rather than an add-on to an existing app that serves a larger market (like Uber, Lyft, etc). At the same time, we didn’t want to diverge too far from what people were familiar with when using these sorts of apps – we wanted to give them what they expected and then exceed those expectations.

During the research phase, we learned how much the caregiving experience varies from person to person. From seemingly small things, such as how they would like to view (or not view) information in the app or whether they preferred desktop or mobile, to much more nuanced things, like what accommodations (wheelchair accessibility, extra passengers) and level of service (typical curbside dropoff/pickup vs “white glove” service) their patient(s) would need. Given that a lot of the patients would be elderly or mobility impaired, having the flexibility to tailor the experience to their unique needs would set us apart from other products.

We recognized that offering all of these customizations could potentially become a headache and overwhelm an already overworked caregiver. One way we tried to combat this was to have a patient’s profile drive the booking process – a caregiver would set up their patient’s accommodations during the first booking and then this configuration was saved back to the patient’s profile to be used as defaults when future services were booked.

Another big difference between our product and other rideshare offerings was the understanding that the person booking services (the caregiver) would typically be different than the one utilizing those services (the patient), which could create confusion. This required us to create two distinct experiences for the different user roles. Additionally, some caregivers have more than one patient, which we would need to support. And as a cherry on top, caregivers may also be patients themselves – for example, a wife who takes care of her husband and wants to schedule services for the both of them.

Finding ways to support all of these use cases was a challenge, but gave us the opportunity to build something special for our users.

User Feedback

As a new product with no historical data, real user feedback was crucial.

Focus groups and surveys guided the product's initial direction, but key learnings that lead to product improvement came from Zoom sessions with caregivers.

Participants completed tasks using a clickable prototype while verbalizing their thoughts, which helped us understand the “why” behind their actions and subsequently used that to improve the product experience.

I tested with about six users at each major project milestone and conducted a final set of calls to review the designs that were ultimately built and launched.

These feedback sessions helped validate our assumptions and provided a fresh perspective that undoubtedly improved the product we launched.

Going Forward

The product had a limited launch in January 2024 in Phoenix, AZ and Tucson, AZ, and has received excellent feedback so far, with rollouts in additional markets already planned for later this year.

Wanda is in a great place to expand from offering only rides to fulfilling the initial vision of grocery and meal delivery, contractor and home services, and more, aiming to become the ultimate “everything app” for elderly users.