Overview
NeoCare Solutions supports families with babies born prematurely and residing in the NICU for the first year of life. The service consisted of an on staff team of clinicians and social workers managing over 1000 families.
Learning of the unmet needs in the NICU space, I saw an opportunity for the business to deliver meaningful value to families during a potentially traumatic time. The NeoCare service was typically one of the only centralized points of support for parents. However, the existing product facilitating the service, was under designed and poorly aligned with the needs and expectations of parents and coaches. Knowing we were not supporting users in the best way possible, I took on the challenge of building and leading a team around this initiative.
Role
After joining NeoCare as their principal design hire, I built a small team consisting of a UX designer and product designer to tackle the existing product’s many design needs. Over the following months, I led the team through a comprehensive initiative aimed at improving the user experience for our coaches and parents. The process included an audit and gap analysis of the existing product, qualitative user research, synthesis and concept development. I collaborated closely with product, engineering and leadership on recommendations and design iterations along the way. Prior to leaving, our team delivered a completely new interaction model and visual design system for the product, including a clickable prototype illustrating core features. Another significant contribution included in this effort was moving the platform away from tablet to focus solely on mobile, which resulted in a better user experience for parents and optimized our design and engineering efforts.
Activities
Design leadership, User research and experience design, rapid ideation and wireframing, visual design, concept development, and engineering support.
See links to full documentation at bottom of the page.
Our parents needed guidance and support through a very challenging time. They had questions, concerns and worries and often felt lost through the experience. Our current service was meeting there needs only part way. While they’re relationship with their coaches was great and of high value to them, our digital service component was failing them. We needed to fix it.
At the time, our app was only available on tablet. One thing we learned very quickly was that parents were not using the app on the tablet for a multitude of reasons - and the engagement numbers reflected this.
First thing: meet them where they are - make the app available on mobile. Not just make it available on mobile, but deliver a better, more valuable, connected anywhere, anytime experience on mobile. With a baby in one arm, navigating a larger tablet proved difficult. Additionally parent's didn't carry their tablets around with them. The one device they had on them at all times, always connected – their mobile phones.
Below are a few screens to demonstrate an idea I had around supporting parents when Coaches were not available. Her name is Nia, an AI that can guide and respond to parents needs whenever they have them.