Caregiving is often a mentally and physically demanding job that can impact your health and well-being, job performance and overall life balance. Many caregivers struggle with recognizing their feelings and situation, making it hard for them to set aside time for self-care.

Below is an example of a common caregiving dynamic. Natalie is a middle-aged woman caring for her mom while also balancing a full-time job and raising her kids.

To fully understand things from a caregiver’s perspective, I researched by joining online caregiver support groups, interviewing caregivers from various backgrounds, speaking with professional care advisors, and attending a virtual caregiving workshop. My three goals were to:

• Understand the caregiving system and who is involved.

• Gain insight on caregivers’ unique problems and how they address them.

• Learn about how the caregiving process affects emotional health.

To my surprise, there are not many platforms that address burnout in caregivers. The handful of apps I found were focused on managing caregiving responsibilities, such as being reminded for daily tasks and coordinating care with others. While these are topics I would also like to explore, I wanted my project to focus more on the emotional side of caregiving. However, I found a mental health app, Gratitude, that fell more in line with the kind of product I was envisioning. The app uses journaling and affirmations to improve emotional health.

As I was searching for local caregiving resources, I stumbled upon an amazing free event - a caregiving workshop by the UC Davis Alzheimer's Research Center. The event featured various speakers (physicians, health experts, and professors) who provided information and resources to help caregivers navigate through their unique journey. I learned a great deal about different topics, from caregiving relationship dynamics to communication management to conflict troubleshooting.

This diagram shows the typical members of a care circle. The primary caregiver, who is usually a family member of the care recipient, is the person most involved in the caregiving process.

The role of a family caregiver is not an easy one, and more than often, they will be asked to do things they have never done before. Their personal lives — as spouse or partner, parent, employee, business owner, community member — intersect with caregiving in different ways at different times.

I was able to interview 4 caregivers with different care skill levels and backgrounds, ranging from ages 39-65. Learning about these caregivers’ stories showed me that there is a huge opportunity to create something valuable in the caregiving space.

My research revealed these actionable insights:

Research finds that more than 1 in 5 adults — a total of 53 million adult Americans — are now unpaid family caregivers. Since family caregivers are the most likely to have not honed the skills that can help them detach from their loved one’s illness, I focused on making this user group as the primary user of Kindful (this is not to say that professional caregivers can’t benefit from the product as well).

Source: AARP

Family Caregiversare typically unpaid, and generally haven’t honed the skills to help them detach from their loved one’s illness.

Professional Caregiverscan provide medical and non-medical support. They work long shifts, but have respite built into their schedules.

Natalie represents the average family caregiver - a middle-aged woman taking care of her aging mother. Neil represents a group of caregivers that are often overlooked - men make up a whopping 40% of caregivers, and that number continues to rise.

By creating multiple personas, I am reminding myself to always incorporate inclusivity into my design and to think about how different users may feel while using the app.

From my research, I saw that there is so much potential with what can be done to help support caregivers in their care journey. To help narrow down my focus, I created a list of possible features and prioritized them based on the effort to design and overall impact on the user experience. I chose the "Must Haves", and a couple of additional features that were either High Impact or Low Effort that I thought would make the biggest difference.

The main features I plan to include are:

Daily Check-in

A feature that lets users assess how they’re feeling each day and practice gratitude

Discussion Forum

A place to share experiences anonymously with other caregivers and receive support

Resources

A feed for educational and local resources

Journal

A place where users can log experiences in their caregiving journey

• Completing the Daily Check-in

• Writing in the journal

• Posting a question in the forum

• Searching for resources

For content, I used image placeholders and wrote brief copywriting to help guide users through the flow. Because I was designing a product for an older audience, I made sure to:

→ Simplify flows for people with lower-tech literacy
→ Consider large text sizes for accessibility

I centered the test around a fictional use case, giving the tester a narrative to aid recall. Overall, 5/5 users were able to successfully complete the tasks, but based on feedback, I made the following improvements to make the app more approachable for caregivers who are less comfortable with technology.

A new starting screen

Previously, the starting screen of my app was the Reflect section. One of my testers explained that the starting page felt like a barrier between the other features of the app. Depending on a caregiver's situation, their first instinct may be to find a resource or seek help in the forum.

Therefore, I designed a home dashboard that gave caregivers quick and easy access to what they needed in a task-oriented manner. The dashboard will also include daily quotes and featured stories to provide inspiration and motivation upon opening the app.

Guided onboarding demo

To help first-time users understand how to use the app, I created an interactive, guided tour to help users understand how to use the Reflect features. I made sure the tour followed a step-by-step format and that the instructions were easy to understand.

I worked on the user interface design, createing components for buttons, text fields, navigation menus, and icons, alongside developing the visual branding of Kindful.

The name “Kindful” is a play on the words “kind” and “mindful”, attributes that should come with being a caregiver. For name recognition and brand awareness, I chose to stick to a logotype.

I chose color palette of cool toned greens for calmness and golden shades for warmth and friendliness. For the typography, I wanted to create a brand that is calming, welcoming, and family-oriented. I chose Merriweather for top-level headings and with Proxima Nova for the body text. To compliment Kindful's branding, I sourced organic-shaped vector illustrations from undraw.co.