Wanda (case study) - Chris Blum

Wanda.care

Designing an everything app for elderly people and their caregivers

Timeframe

2023-2024

Company

Wanda

MTM

Scope

Product Design, Visual Design, User Research

Deliverables

UX Design, user research report, design system

Background

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 this new product, our vision was to leverage this existing network and expand into an adjacent market: caregivers and their care recipients.

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.

Problem to Solve

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.

From our initial research & chats with caregivers, a few things stood out to us...

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.

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.

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.

Customize your ride

One big research learning was how much the caregiving experience varies from person to person.

Given that many patients would be elderly or mobility impaired, having the flexibility to tailor the experience to their unique needs would set us apart.

Profiles for everyone

We decided that patient profiles 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 a default in the future.

Accessible on all devices

Some caregivers felt more comfortable setting up rides on a desktop computer. Others were more tech savvy and wanted access on the go, so mobile support was also a must.

We worked hard to make the experience on desktop and mobile both have that Wanda magic touch.

Final Designs

Everything in one place

From the main view, a caregiver can get a high level understanding of what is coming up and can quickly re-book trips that happen frequently.

We made sure to support viewing all carereceivers in one view, as our research revealed that often caregivers take care of more than one person.

Quick onboarding

With the level of customization that we supported, there was a lot of potential configuration — to combat this, we only surfaced options as they were needed.

We simplified onboarding to a few steps, which made initial account setup a breeze.

Once a user was ready to book their first ride, we prompted them with options that were specific to their ride experience.

Booking flow — desktop

Users are taken through a step-by-step flow to configure various parts of their ride, including pickup/dropoff locations, level of service, and vehicle type.

Booking flow — mobile

The mobile booking flow aims to be as fully featured as the desktop version, while minimizing potential additional cognitive load due to squeezing a lot of information into a smaller form factor.

Comprehensive checkout

In an effort to build trust through complete transparency, we tried to make the checkout screen as easy to follow as possible — there should be no confusion about how a ride is configured and definitely no surprise fees hidden behind a funky UI.

Wanda Plus

To reward power users — and encourage people to become power users — we launched with a premium tier called Wanda Plus.

This monthly subscription offered discounts on every ride and access to other deals throughout the month.

Post Launch

Impact

The product had a limited launch in January 2024 in Phoenix, AZ and Tucson, AZ, and has received excellent feedback so far.

Rollouts in additional markets are planned for Q3 and Q4 of 2024.

What's Next

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.

In addition, some early feedback we received was wanting a native Wanda app, instead of the webview that we currently have. This is slated to be part of Wanda 2.0.