Better preparing care professionals for their shifts

Introduction to Florence

Florence provides temporary staffing in healthcare settings. Their product connects care professionals to healthcare shifts instead of using traditional call centre agencies who are expensive and inefficient.

My role in this project

I worked in collaboration with our UX researcher to plan the research needed. I then took these findings forward to create the solutions you see below.

The problem

There’s a consistent flurry of negative ratings that we get from care organisations every day based on the performance of our care professionals or the time that they arrived
Since implementing an improved rating/review process we had been monitoring feedback and found that many care professionals were complaining of the tasks they had been expected to do on shift, or simply because they weren’t prepared.
We identified this an opportunity to research further and try to find a way to reduce the negative impact this was having

Business objective: How might we reduce the negative impact this is having on care professionals and care organisations?

Care organisation objective: How can I get staff that turn up to a shift that are happy to carry out their expected duties?

Care professional objective: How can I arrive to shift knowing what is expected of me?

Discovery and understanding

We knew this project would require an overhaul of the current shift browsing experience for care professionals, so the resource and time was available to do a thorough job of resolving as many issues as possible.

Explore

First of all, we had to identify the problem areas with the current experience. This mean speaking to some care professionals to understand their main frustrations, then reviewing our collected negative reviews to understand the different sides of the issue.

Secondly we had to review what we currently had, were we already showing too much much of the wrong things? If so, adding more of the right information decrease the accessibility of this information.

Breaking down the current shift listing to identify the different pieces of information we show. There’s a range of brightly coloured chips that make it difficult to focus on the other important information.

Refine and plan

After exploring the problem areas, we landed on the following as the key focus areas:

Update the browsing list to make it easier to understand the differences between each shift
Update the shift details to highlight the key pieces of information about the shift
Have easier access to key actions and info leading up-to and whilst on the shift
Make ‘ASAP’ shifts (shifts that needing feeling close to their start time) clearer

Another area we were keen to focus on was providing a way to add ad-hoc information about a shift when care organisations post a shift. This was however pushed out of scope for this project to keep changes within the app experience.

Exploring how to show the different actions available for a shift. Highlighted by the green stickers, there were a range of actions seemingly randomly placed throughout the shift screen making it hard to know where to access some important actions.

How we solved the problem

Dashboard, listing and details

When booked into shift, we now provide the key info and actions on the dashboard so that the care professional has quick and easy access to key info and actions when opening the app
The shift listing has now got a restricted use of colour to allow our users to easily digest the information whilst still being able to draw attention to important parts like the need for a driving license
The most important details for a shift are now structured and easy to read at the top of the screen, all actions are now grouped into a menu beneath this rather than scattered throughout the screen

Shifts posted last minute

The use of our attention colour and banner gives us the ability to draw attention to these shifts and some supporting copy to encourage our care professionals to fill the shift
It is now clear when the shift is starting, the start time and whether the rate has increased. Previously this information was causing some challenges, with care professionals often not turning up to the shift because the start time wasn’t replaced by ‘ASAP’

Unit details, location details and help centre

Unit and location information are no longer in the same section helping to highlight the different unit types a location might have
Easy access to the help centre helps care professionals access policy information and an emergency contact
Location details now bring to attention the information that our users most like to see - rating, reliability, parking etc. Further information on the requirements and bed occupancy are easy to digest now that more structure has been given to the information

Did it work?

This is currently in production and soon to be released, we do however have some great feedback from some usability tests that we carried out later in the design phase. Here’s a few comments from those:

“The information is much easier to see now, I know if the shift is on a dementia ward or something else”

“I see now the breakdown of beds and how busy it is, this will be great to know how hard the shift will be with the number of staff”

“This shift is starting soon and I can see the amount I will get paid is more, I wonder how I let the home know when I can arrive”

Once this is released, we’ll be measuring negative reviews, fill rate of ASAP shifts and engagement with the new design to understand how successful these updates are.