BridgeCare Redesign

the solution

Designing to motivate and gain trust

BridgeCare’s ultimate goal is to provide a platform that meets the parent’s demand for childcare with the provider’s supply for program availability. By motivating providers to complete their profile, results in more business opportunities for them.

As a result, we envisioned a new way for BridgeCare to motivate providers to update their availability and center information, so that parents using a BridgeCare site could feel more comfortable to learn, contact, and enroll their child into a child care center.

We redesigned the onboarding experience for providers, in addition to a dashboard with added features for providers to manage and edit their center’s online profile.

We learned that:

1. Parents are currently struggling to adjust to working remotely and need extra help with care for their kids.

2. Providers have space available in their centers and need a way to connect with parents to fill those spots.

3. Government and local organizations partner with BridgeCare to provide a search tool by which parents and providers can connect.

user research

To prove our hypothesis about motivating providers to complete their profile, we conducted seven interviews with child care workers (admin, teachers, staff), which gave us great insight into what their day to day functions were and what were some constraints with enrollment and updating program information processes. Additional interviews and supplemental research provided by Hollie were also utilized in this process.

We further looked more into correspondences about updating availability between Hollie and providers and found that over a three month period, providers with availability were updating on a weekly basis but continued to have vacancies. Why was this happening?

We needed parent insights to learn more about why they would choose one center over another.

Therefore we expanded our interviews and conducted a usability test on their current site, which helped us understand the parent’s search process for child care and revealed the relationship between provider and parent.

behavioral segments

Two behavioral segments were created as a result from our research:

1. Provider: Child care admin that is extremely busy managing two centers and struggles with keeping their information up to date

2. Parent: Busy parent and actively searching for a child care center that encompasses their safety requirements especially because of COVID-19

the user’s journey

Identifying pain points of the user’s journey

From here, we created a service design blueprint to seek out opportunities for growth and to highlight moments of friction for the BridgeCare users in the child care search process. We gained a deeper understanding of how parents form trust with the providers based on the amount of information presented to them.

Due to our three week time constraint, we focused our design on the parent’s journey when selecting a center that best fits their child’s safety.

The way information is collected and displayed about a center from the provider, did not meet the needs of the parents.

To further our design, we created specific features within the onboarding process and center profile management dashboard to instill trust and motivation for the provider, which would impact the parent’s search process.

design strategy

Motivating the provider

Based on our user interviews, we found that providers are extremely busy individuals who struggle to balance their daily duties and to update their center’s online profile regularly.

Our revised solution included a profile strength tool, which would be present in the initial onboarding process and provider dashboard in order to motivate the provider to fully complete the center’s profile.

Another way to motivate the providers was by implementing pro tip boxes throughout the onboarding process and on the provider dashboard. The language used with this feature was incredibly effective and tested well with participants in our usability test by explaining the value of a completed profile and keeping information up to date.

Instilling trust for parents

BridgeCare serves clients across many states with different licensing requirements and rating systems. For the purpose of our prototype we chose their client Trying Together, a non-profit organization supporting child care and education in Pennsylvania that uses the Keystone STARS rating system.

In our research, we found that parents were confused with the state rating systems displayed on a center’s profile. Many thought the stars were reviews and often overlooked centers with two stars or less, which could have negative effects on the center and their availability.

next steps

If we had more time, my team and I would like to integrate the following ideas in future sprints to improve the experience for both parent and provider. 

• Elaborate the profile strength bar. Creating a bar with more division by prioritizing the importance of one section over another would give more clarity upon completing the profile.

• Providing more resources. By giving more resources for the provider, it would motivate a provider to continue to use BridgeCare’s platform.

• Updating highlights section. The order and grouping of this section could be improved for providers when they want to make edits. This would also help clarify center information for parents.

• Focus on information architecture. We would want to reorganize how the information is displayed for parents in the search result, which we started with the center’s profile. In our usability test, parents overlooked certain centers based on the highlights shown.

• Incorporating virtual tours. Parents are concerned with their child’s safety, so this would create a new level of transparency between provider and parent.

• Mobile first design. Most providers using BridgeCare platforms are less tech savvy and only make edits through mobile devices.