Back to work
The journey of me
13th July 2018
The journey of me
13th July 2018
The journey of me
13th July 2018
The journey of me
13th July 2018
Mirissa Beach
Mirissa Beach was my first semi-permanent travel home. I volunteered at Hostel First and redesigned their website. It's a beautiful little surf town with a vibrant nightlife scene.
Whatsapp +447907208982
Client & task
Year
From May 2022
Location
Remote (US based start-up)
Kithward is a trusted senior living marketplace focused on independent living and Continuing Care Retirement Communities (CCRCs). They empower seniors and their families to search for and discover communities by location, price, and amenities, so that they can find the community that will allow them to not just age, but to age well.
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Product design including creating new features and evolving existing components for the customer facing site
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Product design including creating new features and evolving existing components for the admin site
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General visual updates
Working mainly with the head of development to create new product features/pages/components to evolve the product with the customer in mind before its official upcoming launch. The company is small and agile and have the ability to test and validate design designs very quickly. We have weekly check-ins to priorities the design tasks and the work is on-going to constantly improve the customer experience. A big on-going task is also to ensure that the site has consistency and great a design system/component library for the brand to keep to this consistency. The brand colour and accessibility was looked into and improved.
The solution
The projects
Search page updates
Updates to existing pages are common tasks for Kithward. This page appears after the user has completed onboarding and is intended to be the landing page that houses all saved communities, notifications and events. The previous structure of the page was confusing to users so we looked at moving elements like the messaging to join the people section and creating a manage people title for these actions. Consistency was a big thing to look at and meant that all icons were updated and created as uniformed icon sizes in the components section.
The process I followed was working with the existing designs in the figma file and comparing them against the live staging site and evolving the features. The updates were based on real user issues from interviews using the platform, A B testing results and my own desk research on competitors and best practises. This process was the same for all of the mini projects.
Financial calculator
The financial calculator was a new page and flow that we created on mobile and desktop. It is a series of questions designed to find out as much detail about the potential client's financial status in order for Kithward to show them realistic communities to match their budget. We faced numerous design challenges about how to house the complex table info with radio buttons/check boxes, especially on mobile. I worked closely with the head of development to iron out any concerns and to ensure all the info was not only user friendly but relevant to them to collect.
The easy to use step-by-step page for each question was a deliberate design decision to ensure the user would not have cognitive overload for each question and can focus on the task in had. Each section where data is collected was carefully thought out to ensue that the correct info is collected as accurately as possible to give the user the actual communities they can afford. Working closely with the head of development who understood deeper what data was needed was crucial to the success of this flow.
Glossary
The glossary was a new page that can be accessed in the navigation under "Guidance". Its purpose was to educate users that may not be that familiar with the acronyms and specialty words used in the industry. We defined a background pattern that can be used with some variants for this page, as previously several different textures were being used. I would research, concept and design in isolation and then review with the product owner/CEO and head of tech. The interactions here were looked at and made clear to the developers.
Admin portal updates
A more complex task we worked on was the admin portal. The page is where the community owners enter information and notes for each level of care. We rethought the page structure as this page originally had the side bar on the left, taking up a lot of real estate. We deemed the side bar as clutter because at this stage we want the user's full attention on the info they are inputting. We thought about how the nested tabs can work with the different select style for the top level. One goal was to encourage the communities to fill out all the levels of care and each section within, which is why we added in the % complete at the top to gamify it a little, with a personal message linked to the level of completion. For the interaction we intended the title and percentage to be hidden when the user scrolls past it, but keep the tabs sticky. The profile info was also redesigned to make it more digestible.
The notes feature and ability to view previous notes and add new ones was also a new function, that was intended to be very useful for communities with multiple people who update and maintain the content.
This page took us several collaborative meetings and iterations to come to this design solution.
