Urbansitter
Improving the recurring booking process for parents looking for caregivers.
October 2021 - Present
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Background
UrbanSitter make it simpler for parents to find great caregivers for child care, pet care and senior care through their friends and social circles. UrbanSitter helps to support families and caregivers so they can say yes to more in their lives, pursuing their choice of career, education, family and self
Problem
UrbanSitter is historically strong in supporting the one-time care find and booking flows, however we have much room to improve on the recurring side of the marketplace. Since COVID< companies are more motivated to offer care benefits to their employees so that they may find and manage recurring care (part- or full-time). Improving the employee experience of recurring care to increase the odds of securing a successful contract renewal.
Contributions
- User Research
- Information Architecture
- Interface Design
- Usability Testing
Collaborators
- David Smith - VP, Product
- Laura Crowther - Senior Product Manager
- Teddy Del Rosario - Software Engineer, IOS
- Travis Dobbs - VP, Engineering
Goal
Add new verticals to the recurring booking flow and decrease the number of expired recurring bookings to below 30% by improving the employee experience of recurring care to reduce member friction and frustration and reducing sitters frustration with accepting bookings.
Outcome
An improved recurring booking experience, allowing caregivers accept/decline recurring booking experience in one go! We tested with caregivers and they found the experience so much better than the current one.
My role
I collaborated with the Product Manager to conduct user research and usability testing. I also led the design efforts working in Figma to design the user interface, and built prototypes and tested using Maze for feedback, and collaborated with the developers to ensure it was adequately implemented.
Research
We looked at the current numbers to evaluate
- The flow in its current state adds some complexities to the *booking management* process. and this lead to 34% of recurring bookings request expire (receive no response from a caregiver).
- Additionally, other verticals aren’t supported in the recurring booking flow.
- It is also time consuming and annoying for a caregiver to respond to each individual booking request when they receive a recurring booking. As a result, sitters often won’t respond and the bookings will expire.
“34% of recurring bookings request expire (receive no response from a caregiver).”
Improved User flow
We introduced a new user flow based on what worked
CREATE A BOOKING
PARENT - RESCHEDULE OR CANCEL BOOKING(S)
SITTER - ACCEPT OR DECLINE BOOKING(S)
Visual Design
PARENT - CREATING A BOOKING
The new flow introduced a simplified process with the addition of the verticals following the IOS guideline and existing design system of the application. It first shared with the engineering team. Good feedback was gotten. The initial design had one-off booking and recurring booking on the same list. Teddy and Travis explained that with the current engineering architecture, it will be hard to mix both types of bookings all at once, and it was easier to separate them into groups.
PARENT - SCHEDULING AND CANCELING BOOKING REQUEST(S)
One of the new features needed to be introduced was allowing parents perform bulk actions on recurring bookings created. Parents want to be able to bulk reschedule or cancel days within a recurring booking set.
SITTERS - ACCEPT/DECLINE BOOKING(S)
Sitters can book accept or decline bookings and can also cancel already accepted bookings and state their reason for canceling a booking.
Usability Testing
I tested using [maze.co](http://maze.co) to gather user feedback and discover pain points in the current design. With the help of the product manager, Laura, we recruited participants for both the parent and sitter flow. Overall, we received good feedback from the participants.
Some of the pain points discovered were:
- Increasing the size of the one-time/recurring booking toggle so that it’s easier to find
- Accept All/Decline All actions felt weird because no checkboxes were selected (it might be too easy to take that action without realizing it)
- Breaking up large recurring booking sets into pagination.
Before
After
Before
After
