A 15 minute neighbourhood service design supporting elderly caregivers and their partners in Charnwood Borough council area take care of their wellbeing

PROJECT OVERVIEW

Title: Takecare

Type of Work: Service design | 5 member team project

My role: User researcher, Ideator, Pitch presenter

Extent of project: March 2022 - April 2022 | 8 weeks

Take Care is a service designed for older adults who care for a partner. Our service aims to create time for these individuals to invest in themselves and boost their confidence by receiving well-being treatments such as massages, hair, and nails.

ABOUT

Deliver a useful, meaningful and transformative proposition for a 15 minute neighbourhood service that helps locals in Charnwood engage with their community in a new and exciting way.

BRIEF

Service model, Value proposition, Business model, Service video prototype.

DELIVERABLES

PROCESS

We used a mixed methodology of design thinking, lean and agile processes, pivoting our concept at each key iterations after weekly sprints and tests. The following methods were used throughout our design process.

IDENTIFY IDEAS

Future states workshop

Creating personas

Value proposition

Gigamapping

CONCEPT VALIDATION

Body storming

Value flow mapping

Hypothesis

Interviews

DEFINE SERVICE

Secondary research

Expert panel meetings

Business model

Storyboarding

Service video prototype

DELIVER

Service model

Storyboard

Value proposition

Growth plan

Hi-fi service video

KEY ITERATIONS

From our initial idea our service pivoted six times.

WEEK 1

The vision

Wellbeing and beauty services will provide a tailored, accessible and relatable experience for everyone.

In a future states workshop guided by Jack from Wilson Fletcher, we did some sense making activities to end up with a vision for what a service that creates a 15 minute neighbourhood might look like in Charnwood.

A beauty service was chosen because it was a topic of common interest for everyone in the group and was agreed on. It created a platform for us to draw from our experiences using beauty services in order to identify gaps which can be filled and applied to our service. We fed this idea back to the whole class and received constructive feedback.

This activity helped us really think about the value we want our service to provide such as physical treatments and wellbeing experiences which should be tailored and relatable to different people to promote accessibility.

Future states workshop, brainstorming and ideation.
Key ingredients and values of beauty service.

WEEK 2

Value proposition for caregiver

“Our beauty service offering Health Care Assistants (HCA), helps family care givers who want to take better care of themselves, but have little time by providing a vetted HCA to look after dependants, reducing guilt associated with leaving a vulnerable family member, and enabling customers have more time to look after themselves and feel more confident while receiving support on their mental health unlike current beauty providers.”

Different personas were created and family care givers was decided to be our target group focusing on characteristics rather than age. Confidence is a big aspect of what we want our service to provide so this was emphasized with further research.

A value proposition canvas along with a value proposition statement was created. Gigamapping helped to explore new opportunities in our chosen service such as mobile beauty services and look at the current landscape systematically.

A storyboard of our initial concept using bodystorming in order to have a visual representation of how our service works and use it as reference when speaking to other people during interviews and critiques.

Persona of family care giver Anna
Value proposition for care givers
Gigamapping helped to explore new opportunities
Storyboard of initial service concept
Service blueprint helped identified key processes and touchpoints

WEEK 3

Service hypothesis

“Care givers will like the idea of talking therapy during their appointment with their beauty practitioner.”

Value flow mapping identified the different people we wanted to engage with about our ideas, we came up with a plan on how to strategically collect information amongst ourselves in the group due to lean method of the project.

We came up with a few hypotheses surrounding our service directed at those who we want to interview and we used these to come up with interview questions.

Care givers who looked after a family member were interviewed to get insight into their day to day experience and feelings in this role, due to ethics we could not directly talk to care receivers so the care givers gave us information about their dependants experience.

Beauty therapists such as hairdressers were consulted to get insights from their experience practicing in context. To get a well rounded neutral view we also got in touch with other people who are not our direct customer to ask them questions about our service.

value flow map to identify key stakeholders
Generated hypothesis of service

WEEK 4

Value proposition for care receivers

“Our service can help elderly care receivers without a severe physical and mental health condition by supporting them to engage in social activities and give their carer more freedom and personal space, by reducing the loneliness and the guilt associated with being a burden on their family members and by improving their social lives and relationships.”

Interviews were conducted and insights were documented, we found out the idea of talking therapy was something that both the beauty therapists and care givers embraced, however there were some concerns surrounding this, such as funding to train the therapists and privacy issues.

The idea of a mobile beauty service was welcomed but emphasis was placed on providing value to the care receiver. We took this on board by pivoting Takecare service to include care receivers and came up with the idea of creating value for them by working with community centres.

We found also out that some care receivers might not like the idea of a healthcare assistant looking after them as it implies a clinical situation or context, hence we decided to opt for volunteers to support these group moving forward in this process.

Key quotes from interviews

WEEK 5

Refined service hypothesis

“We are assuming care receivers want to have more social time and are willing to go to community centres.”

We came up with a few hypotheses regarding our refined service idea surrounding care givers, care receivers, volunteers, mobile service and funding.

For assumptions surrounding elderly care receivers, we would test this out by conducting more interviews with their care givers. Our target users were also asked about their level of interest in the mobile caravan service being placed in strategic locations such as supermarkets.

We did secondary research and conducted interviews with experts from the council to find out details regarding funding.

Volunteer feature was tested this out by creating a page where students who can gain value from volunteering can register their interest.

Value proposition canvas was created for care receivers and prototyped a lo-fi version of our service was video prototyped.

5Ws and 1H of assumptions
Value proposition for care receivers
Hypothesis of how service will be funded

WEEK 6

Questions being considered

What are the criteria of the elderly people that are supported in community centres?
Would they accommodate clients from our service into their existing service?
What role would our volunteers play whilst using their service?

We conducted bodystorming to test out the feature of talking therapy and privacy concerns because this is a new feature we are intoducing to this kind of service.

We found out that it was easy to engage in conversation in a salon style environment which corroborates what we found out in previous interviews, however the atmosphere can become awkward when talking about something personal whilst a stranger is next to you. The environment can also be disruptive when the therapist is attending to other things or people which made it hard for a continuous flow of conversation.

The mobile beauty caravan context was tested out and it was by contrast a more appropriate setting for talking therapy as it provided an intimate and private environment without being uncomfortable or awkward.

We learned that we need to consider how we can maintain privacy in both salon and caravan settings whilst providing beauty and wellbeing services, we thought about things like interior design rearrangement.

Testing out the feature of talking therapy whilst receiving beauty service

WEEK 7

Final value proposition for care givers

Take care beauty service with talking therapy, helps care givers looking after their elderly family members, who want to improve their physical and mental wellbeing, by reducing stress and the guilt associated with leaving care receiver behind, and creating time for care giver to take care of themselves while the care receiver spends time in a community activity, unlike current beauty service providers.

At this point we were conducting final interviews to solidify our service whilst updating our working documents. we were looking at the different care needs that the care receivers may have and how this will affect the current direction of our service as we are now using volunteers, their physical and mental care needs cannot be severe. This was confirmed in interviews with experts at community centre as they require their clients to be able to ‘finish personal tasks’ with little to no support.

We considered what type of business model we wanted our service to follow taking into account our value propositions and we eventually decided that although our service exists to benefit the community it is not a charity or non profit organisation. we updated our working documents to reflect these changes.

From a final interview with a care giver, we found out that our service would be better suited to older couples who normally will be living together, this means the caregiver takes care of and supports their partner 24/7, as a result we pivoted our service to focus on these groups.

We planned the schedule for shooting our hi-fi video and created materials for the video such as our brand logo which was used in the leaflets and identity badges that were used as props.

An updated gigamap of our service
Value flow map representing ‘future state’ of our service
plan and schedule of service video shoot
Business model canvas of Take care
Updated service blueprint
Updated value proposition for care giver
Updated value proposition for care receivers

WEEK 8

Key pillars of Takecare service

Building bonds
Boosting confidence
Accessibility

We developed the narrative through storyboarding for our service and shot a hi-fi video prototype for our service using the lessons we learned in story telling workshop. We practiced using the camera effectively to portray emotions and facial expressions and how to use lighting and positioning to emphasize certain parts of a story.

After the final pivot we concluded the final future states value flow map which emphasises the key ingredients that Takecare service provides to their customers and the community:

Building bonds

Boosting confidence

Accessibility

Our service is now aimed at older adults aged 65 years and over without severe physical and mental health care needs. We identified the population of these groups in the Charnwood area and came up with a strategy in our service model to fulfil the 15 minutes neighbourhood by placing our mobile caravans in these hotspots weekly.

Scenes from video prototype shoot of service
Updated value flow map
persona of new target group

DESIGN OUTCOME

Brick and mortar service

Take Care works with volunteers and charities that host community gatherings for care receivers. Our service can help reduce the guilt of leaving a partner behind while taking care of yourself.

Another benefit of our service is the optional talking therapy caregivers receive whilst having treatment.

Caravan service

The caravans will be set up in predefined locations daily. Locations are selected based on areas with the highest population of our target market—for example, Thurmaston, which has a population of around 3000 over 65s.

OUR THREE KEY PILLARS

Boosting confidence

Having time to invest in oneself can improve confidence by having treatments that benefit their inner and outer beauty, building confidence and improving mental and physical wellbeing.
Accessibility

Typically, beauty salons are located in town centres, however, rural areas tend to have a higher proportion of older people than urban areas, so our mobile service can be easily accessed within 15 minutes by all customers.
Building bonds

The changing balance of responsibility and lifestyle, being together all the time, and stress can cause strained relationships between caregiver and partner. We believe creating time for caregivers and receivers to spend independently will help to improve their personal and romantic relationship.

SERVICE MODEL

Our service acts as an extension of the current beauty service model, but with a twist. Take Care bridges the gap between beauty and wellbeing treatments and therapy. Other beauty services expect customers to create their own time and make their own arrangements to care for their loved ones. In contrast, Take Care can make care arrangements that create time for caregivers. This way, it grants beauty services a social significance rather than a luxury experience by focusing on caregivers, accessibility, and sustainability.

Our service exists to benefit the community, but it is not a charity or non-profit organisation. Generally, baby boomers have above average levels of disposable income (actually being responsible for 51% of the UK's total wealth), hence why we chose to create a service that is for profit.

OUR USER EXPERIENCE

OUR SERVICE VALUE

Benefiting carers, benefiting the ecosystem

Benefiting quality of life and the planet

Strengthening business and community relationships

Adding value to the society

Reducing carbon footprint by making service a 15-min-walk.

Enhance the reputation of beauty and well-being services.

Our service can help the NHS reduce mental health care costs overtime.

Take Care hopes to reduce the number of people using private transportation.

Take Care will build strong relationships with charity day centres.

Improving overall quality of life of vulnerable groups.

Opportunities for new charities to develop and existing ones to expand.

Market expansion to accommodate other vulnerable groups in the community

BIGGER IMPACTS

The minimum viable option exists in Charnwood, with two caravans to begin with and one salon. Starting in a small area means that we can utilise low-cost marketing methods such as word-of-mouth.

The increased awareness of our service will give us enough revenue to reinvest and spend on expanding to more locations with high demand target groups (growth forecast, number of new users.

More beauty caravans will be acquired and we will scope and select charities to collaborate with in new locations.

We will be recruiting beauty therapist and training them with basic mental health awareness for talking therapies.

VIDEO PROTOTYPE

TESTIMONIALS

“In British culture, it is common for older couples to look after each other. They need this service as they take care of their partner 24/7.”

— Family caregiver 1
“When you're busy, taking care of yourself feels like a luxury. But looking after yourself can have a huge boost on your confidence and self esteem. ”

— Beauty therapist
“This service not only expands the current market to caregivers, but it also satisfies the needs of current customers.”

— Salon owner

INDIVIDUAL REFLECTION

Before starting the service brief, we created a user manual worksheet to get to know each other, which worked well as an icebreaker. Overall, we collaborated effectively, sharing our ideas while showing respect and listening, even when we disagreed. This open communication was key.

Working across different fields allowed us to use our strengths in certain areas while learning from others in areas we were less experienced. The project used a lean and agile approach, which required me to be strategic and adaptable. Conducting interviews with family caregivers, community centre experts, and local council experts provided valuable insights about our target users’ needs and challenges.

It was rewarding to see how the information gathered helped shape our final solution. This project expanded my design thinking. While I was used to the double diamond approach, working in a lean way was also fulfilling and effective. I learned to adapt quickly based on stakeholder and user feedback. I look forward to applying these lessons in future projects.