Booking care work from your phone

I joined Florence about two years into the companies life as their first hire in the design team. At the time I joined there were around 30 people in the team working to fill temporary care shifts across the adult social care sector.

My first port of call was to look at the Florence worker experience

The idea here was to create a product to help ease the process of booking work with Florence for all nurses and carers to make their experience with our platform simpler and more intuitive.

Our reasearch told us we needed to work on something mobile first when we noticed that 80% of our user base accessed our platform via their mobile phone. Therefore, our proposed solution was to completely rebuild our worker experience with a focus on mobile apps. The idea here was that we could give our users a better experience using features available on a native app.

“80% of our user base accessed our platform via their mobile phone”

We pitched our idea back to the CEO and COO and got the green light

This meant it was now time to calculate our MDP. The minimum delightful product we could build to get our users onto our new platform.

After whiteboarding out our whole user journey, we decided our first MDP would be of our core journeys for onboarded users. This was for two reasons, firstly our onboarding process is a long and complicated, on average (mean) a user takes 14.8 days to get through onboarding which means we’d need a lot of buy in to keep our audience engaged from that initial download. Secondly, our core customer support team would need to support this, which meant more build time, therefore we decided to focus on our core journeys first and tackle onboarding as a separate project.

As always user testing forms a vital part of the app design process

Learning how different groups of people behave with technology and truly understanding their frustrations is something I’ve always found fascinating. Therefore when designing the app I knew we had to bring in our users to conduct full user testing flows of our apps MDP.

Using Marvel’s new User Testing feature we were able to both see in person and then analyse again via video how our users interacted with our platform proposal and make tweaks to our flow based on their behaviour. This insight proved invalueable to us as we worked on the app.

How do we build a similar experience on two platforms?

I decided that the best way to start was to design out a range of custom components that felt at home on both iOS and Android. Building on the colour palette I’d already refreshed for Florence, I opted to ensure that all colours and components were bright and therefore easy to use and identify with Florence as a brand.

As I worked closely with our iOS lead (the only native app engineer we had at the time) it was also easy to create solutions on the fly to issues he had whilst building the first version of our app.

The app that I worked on is now live and available to download on both iOS and Android