Daniel Kim
In 2023, Unite Us hosted its annual one Continuum conference with existing and prospective customers to demonstrate the vision and direction of our product suite. The UX team took this opportunity to demonstrate how enhancing personalization could help our users manage what can often feel like an overwhelming set of daily tasks.
In a followup visionware project, we explored how a client-facing app could increase engagement into our Network, and make access to care more reachable for an otherwise confusing system of care.
The care managers and social service organizations that engage with our app daily are faced with a very large set of tasks that can feel overwhelming and often times unmanageable. Tasks include things like screening clients for social needs, assessing eligibility into reimbursable services, and referring clients to organizations that provide services, while managing funds allocated to reimbursing those services. Our users currently use homegrown methods for task management, including things like Asana, google or paper lists to keep track of outreach and followups with clients to compensate for a lack of ability in our app.
Our app currently supports these needs with a dashboard, highlighted in green, of referrals, cases and assistance requests, and other tools like a task list and client profiles, highlighted in red, where users can document updates on client care. These feature sets often feel disjointed and don’t reflect the centralized workflow our users actually need.
Another need we identified was for a client-facing portal. A study of 421 homeless adults in CA areas showed that about 94-97% of respondents owned a cell phone either currently or in the past 3 months. However, there was also found to be a high degree of turnover rate of phones among homeless adults at about 56% reporting to own 2+ phones in 3 months. Because of inconsistent mobile access, we decided to design both a mobile and desktop view of the portal.
The Task List on the left allows our users to not only view their own tasks, but those assigned to the organization at large. This allows for a more flexible task management system where users can assign tasks to the right people.
The activity feed on the right keeps users up to date on updates across the organization, and a client intake card allows users to manage their client lists and take action with enhanced prioritization.
While most clients have phones, they can’t always keep them charged or may have unreliable data and internet access. We believe a desktop version of the client portal could help solve this problem. On the left a user can view all active referrals they are engaged in. Opening a referral, they can see where they are in the process of receiving care through the tracker at the top. They also have quick access to contact their Care Manager (Jill Gordon) for followups or updates.
