Creating a fair marketplace that limits bad experiences

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 collaborated with our UX researcher on this discovery-heavy project. We did a couple of workshops together with some stakeholders before getting a plan together with designs and a pitch deck.

The problem

Florence is a marketplace with care professionals (the supply) and the care locations (the demand)
The quality of care professionals can vary widely, some create a poor experience by not caring about the level of care they provide, sometimes going on to cause a serious incident that poses a risk to the person they’re caring for
Operations and governance at Florence are struggling to cope with the number of negative reviews and incidents to manually review, yet the product doesn’t do anything to help this

Business objective: How can we reduce the impact on governance/ops, improve the quality of care professionals on the platform and increase client satisfaction and retention

User objective: How can I as a care organisation be sure that the care professional that Florence provides is reliable, cares about what they do and will perform well on their shift?

Discovery and understanding

What isn’t working?

The current ratings experience was ambiguous. Words like good, poor and fair were used which after looking at the data were obviously being interpreted differently depending on the client
All negative reviews ended up in the same place, all requiring manual review by governance regardless of severity
Reviews and ratings were not transparent for either care org or care professional. It wasn’t easy to see your score, there was no documentation and it wasn’t clear what happened if you didn’t do well

“If they ask you to come back I guess that’s a good sign but you wouldn’t really know if you’ve done a good job, I’d say that’s a bit of a grey area”

— A Florence care professional

Governance workflow

To understand more about the areas we could have impact, we had to understand the other parts of the service that helped manage ratings.

We learnt that a proportion of the negative reviews left by care organisation were sadly discriminatory due to their status as a temporary worker or worse. Whilst upsetting, this was a critical piece of information that would inform how we dealt with negative ratings. It couldn’t be a totally automated process as a result so our teams worked together to create a solution that reduced the resource needed whilst protecting the car professionals from discrimination.

Prioritise and align

The business and user problems were focused around handling negative experiences. Whilst we uncovered other opportunities, we refined our proposal for how to tackle these problems.

Make the ratings experience less ambiguous
Collect more meaningful feedback
Create engaging documentation to introduce how ratings work
Bring automation into the product to reduce impact on governance
Recognise care professionals who consistently do a good job

Solving (some of) the problem

Only the part of the project where we collected better data had a place in our upcoming strategy. We therefore knew we’d have to pitch our findings to other stakeholders. This was a critical piece of the project as it not only helped share the current state of the product, but also helped to align different areas of the business and get buy in for this to feature soon on our roadmap.

What did we achieve?

This project is a bit of a long game to realise it’s full potential however, the work that we’ve carried out here creates the foundations for a truly fairer marketplace that creates a better experience for all. In the short term, we were more than content with the following achievements:

We got all key stakeholders onboard with: - The current state of the product being unacceptable - The need to protect our care professionals from discrimination - Being aligned on the approach for how to improve our marketplace The main success here was getting a place on the roadmap for the next iteration of improvements
We launched a new way of leaving a reviews for care professionals and organisations so that it was: - More accountable - Less ambiguous - More useful to act on As a result, we now have the ability to view the sentiment of reviews left for care professionals and locations to understand which are most important to address elsewhere