TEAM
Darwin, Design Researcher/Service Designer
Kerri M, Service Design Manager
Caitlin M, Manager of Homecare Workforce Practice Transformation
RESPONSIBILITIES
• Design Research Methods
• Facilitate Co-design Workshops
• Organize Data
• Facilitate Analysis Sessions
• Insights Synthesis
• Storyboard + Insights Presentation/Reports
• Develop Presentation
OBJECTIVE
The goal of this project is to surface gaps between the skills (and resources) the caregivers obtained from their training and the realities of in-home care giving and care receiving. Each quarter, the workshop would uncover different topic areas depending on the needs of the stakeholders: Competency Development Team. Ultimately, however, we’re serving the needs of caregivers and the people they provide care for, thus, close collaboration with the stakeholders is imperative.
RESEARCH FRAMEWORK
Utilizing generative co-design workshop as the main research method, we primarily look at caregiver’s Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) around providing specific care for their clients. However, we are looking at the JTBD not only in context of the environment, actors, actions, and interactions of Activity of Daily Living (ADL), but also caregiver’s background and mental models.
The general timeline was about 6–8 weeks (depending on the number of participants). It started with survey (as recruitment and screener), which participants were then invited to be in the co-design workshops.
From the qualitative data generated in the co-design workshops, storyboards and diagrams are used as tools to illustrate the experiences of caregivers providing ADL to their clients and to hint at the systemic problems that might contribute to the challenges caregivers encounter. The insights would then be used by competency developer to create new training materials for the caregivers.
RESEARCH METHOD: CO-DESIGN WORKSHOP
Generative research workshops consisted of three acts:
ACT 1
The first act took a look at the participant’s general experiences and sentiments of their perspective in different aspects of being a caregiver.
ACT 2
The second act looked at slices of caregiver’s daily experiences providing care for their clients. It consisted of various care moments that made the biggest impression to the caregivers (using image cards). Finally, the participants will write down what they wish were different for each Care Moment.
ACT 3
Act 3 asked the participants to layout the current processes (JTBD) they do through to achieve a certain goal consisting of various phases such as “Pre-” activity or interaction before the process started, leading to “Starting Point” and elaborated in the “Middle” to finally reaching the end goal. Act 3 was thematic based on specific area of inquiry related to skills for ADL. In each step, the participants were asked to indicate the people, objects, and places they interact with, and their feelings accompanying each step.
Act 1, 2, and 3 proceeded consequentially in a 2-hour workshop. Participants would spend the least amount of time during Act 1, which also worked as a warm-up before going to the “main event”. In Act 2, participants would only work individually, but in Act 3, after individual work, participants were asked to share their experiences and discuss as a group before presenting their selected work. While the workshop is designed to facilitate up to 5 people, at most there were only 3 people showing up in any of the workshops conducted.
ANALYSIS: Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD)
The analysis uses JTBD framework by looking at specific goals caregivers were trying to accomplish. Each participant in the co-design workshops had specific stories they told and experiences they generated. All the qualitative data were organized into specific themes emerged from the workshops.
ANALYSIS: Diagrammatic
Another way to analyze the data was to create a diagram of the specific theme (and each corresponding step with each JTBD: [Theme 1 [JTBD-1 [Step 1, Step 2, … Step N], JTBD-2 [Step 1, Step 2, … Step N], … JTBD-N […] ] ], and so on. The purpose of creating diagrams is to visualize what the participant went through to help better understand their experiences.
ANALYSIS: Caregiver-Client Ecotone
Ecotone, in this case, can be defined as the overlapped and tensioned area/zone between the caregivers and clients because each bring with them their own rules and structures. The function of this framework is to sketch out the caregiver-client interactions diagrammatically. The purpose of this framework is to surface some hints as to the “why” of the actors’ behaviors from a systems perspective. As illustrated below, one of the analysis framework we were attempting to build used diagrams in order to get a systemic and holistic view of the experience providing care for a client.
This framework could start from very simplistic interactions, e.g., the caregiver’s tasks and the client’s feedback.
But those behaviors were influenced by their circumstances and surroundings, for example. habits and culture. The Ecotone diagram could reach the details of complexity including mental model, structure and support system.
INSIGHTS: Caregiver Experiences through Storytelling
Stories and insights of specific instances are important to contextualize the development of training materials. Thus, storyboards were used to help stakeholders understand the experiences of providing ADL for the clients. Various simple storyboards — from 4 to 8 panels — were sketched out to illustrate the participant’s experiences including JTBD, context of interactions, activities, users, objects used, and environments around caregiving. Below are just some examples of what the storyboards could be.
DELIVERABLES: INSIGHTS PRESENTATION
After developing the storyboards, more detailed analysis needed to be provided for the stakeholders — qualitative and quantitative analysis, secondary research, and the storyboards themselves were included in the insights presentation.
ACTIONS + RECOMMENDATIONS
After presenting the insights, there were a series of actions for each topic area, using “How might we…” structure to help the Competency Development team develop and/or revise the training materials for the caregivers.
IMPACTS
1. Competency Development Team took the insights and developed training materials — to update on Basic Training (BT) and adding new course for Continuing Education (CE).
2. The emerging theme spawned a new research initiative: on caregiver-client relationship— which became a paper that I co-wrote and was presented at Global Carework Summit (2019).
3. The various insights reports in conjunction with other internal research also influenced other initiatives for the caregivers, such as: Mental health — ginger.io, Financial management, etc.
REFLECTIONS
1. Co-design workshop was not exactly an ideal method to understand the actual experiences of providing care. Co-design was an ideal tool, however, when time and budget are incredibly restrictive. It provided hints to what the participants experienced. The most appropriate research method for this particular instance is still good ol’ observations.
2. The diagrammatic framework seemed to be working well in sketching out systemic problem and contextualizing the caregiving experience for specific persona, profile, demographic, and so on. However, while it illuminate the structural issues, little can be done to implement change as the problem is too big and out of scope for this particular project.
3. Storyboards are very impactful to engage audience and tell user’s stories. However, the constraints of the storyboards could only provide surface level understanding of participant’s experiences — specificity are often needed to be supplemented in a separate insight document.
