My role: user researcher and designer
I joined forces with our UX strategist to plan and conduct mixed-methods research and create a roadmap for solving salient problems we uncovered. We partnered with 2 product managers while collecting and synthesizing qualitative and quantitative data. Then the UX strategist and I prototyped and tested the solutions we designed. From there, we helped the product managers prioritize development of our proposed solutions.
Before trying to solve DSPs’ problems, we needed to learn about them
First, I did a deep dive into existing literature and research from other organizations to see what the rest of the industry was saying about DSPs. A few big problems surfaced: a churn crisis in the DSP profession due to bad pay, unfairness between coworkers, bad relationships with managers, unappreciated low-dignity work, and mitigating life circumstances. DSPs' lives are typically high-stress due to poverty and high work demands, demands on their schedules, and demands on the kinds of work they must do for the people they support. And the industry-wide costs related to DSP churn are astronomical. Was there anything we could do to make DSPs' lives easier?
DSP churn levels in the caregiving industry are high, and the costs associated with turnover are astronomical.
One of the first things we learned from the stakeholders and subject matter experts was that DSPs receive what’s called an Individualized Support Plan (ISP) for each person they support. These ISPs traditionally come in the form of a huge binder (often over 100 pages) full of information about the person they support. DSPs log their daily activities manually, and the state is billed based on those activities performed that are outlined in the ISP.
A page from an example ISP. It's really hard to read, skim, and scan.
To help us better understand DSPs, what their job consisted of day-to-day, and what pain points or obstacles most often got in their way of a good work experience and doing their best work, the UX strategist, the 2 product managers, and I composed a series of research questions. To answer these research questions, we found 13 DSP volunteer participants and conducted a survey, a 2-week diary study, and follow-up interviews. I also conducted stakeholder and subject matter expert interviews. And, a few members of our team went through DSP training.
One of the most important findings in the diary study was that DSPs often try to use the ISP for emergent information they quickly need.
To uncover how ISPs were actually used by DSPs, as well as to learn more about their daily roles and how they logged billable and non-billable information, the UX strategist and I conducted a two-week study with DSPs. We sent an initial survey about what devices they use (computers or phones), how they log what they do, and when they believe they typically log what they do. Each day for 10 workdays, the DSPs filled out a diary detailing what information they logged, how often they logged it, and how often they accessed the ISP throughout their shift. We followed up with five of these DSPs who were willing to participate in interviews, asking them more in-depth follow-up questions about their day-to-day work experiences.
One of the things we had DSPs log every day in the diary study included when they accessed ISPs
Synthesizing the data
The 4 of us took all the data we found from the background research, subject matter expert interviews, training, DSP interviews, survey, and diary study research and built an affinity diagram. This meant we created a thematic analysis, taking observations, grouping them, and naming those groups. We did that to help uncover hidden themes that wouldn’t be obvious from just looking at the data. (And to reduce researcher bias.)
Our affinity diagram resulted in 79 thematic groups and 9 over-arching actionable insights.
Assets to inspire empathetic solutions
From here, we created easily digestible DSP personas (i.e.: fictitious, data-informed representations of the kinds of users we are designing solutions for), which could then be leveraged by teams across the organization to enlighten everything from DSP recruiting and business strategy to product design and brand messaging, to inform our product design, infusing these personas with all that we’d found throughout our research, in an easy to understand, digestible form. From there, we had to flesh out actionable recommendations. We created a low fidelity journey map to illustrate how we thought we could intervene on some of the problems we learned about. And we presented our top insights to the company.
One of our DSP proto-personas
