Empowering homecare communities through innovative, research-driven design solutions to provider-consumer unresponsiveness on Carina’s homecare matching platform

University of Washington 2023 iSchool Capstone Project sponsored by Carina

About the Project

Carina has gotten consistent feedback from users that they have sent messages and never received responses. This project focused on bringing visibility to unresponsiveness on the platform via user research and designing features to address this issue and reduce the number of messages that go unanswered, thus improving the frequency of successful matches between consumers and providers.

What is Carina?

Carina is a two-sided market matching platform where people with Medicaid looking for home care ("consumers") can match with home care providers ("providers"). Both consumers and providers can create accounts and connect with each other via consumer job posts and provider profiles. Both parties can message each other on the platform to connect with each other.

Key Features for Unresponsiveness

After extensive research via interviews, surveys, literature review, and market research, we found a major problem contributing to unresponsiveness was related to notifications. The majority of users who were unresponsive planned to respond but forgot or never ended up seeing the message notification in the first place. Our features aimed to address this sub-issue of unresponsiveness related to notifications.

Message Reminders

Unread message summaries via text and email notifications remind users to respond to messages they haven't read yet. We found from our research that users plan to respond to their messages at a later time but forgot, so having this additional reminder can let users know which messages they still need to respond to.

Notification Reminders

Notification reminders will pop-up on the screen when (1) providers change their availability to "available" and (2) consumers post a job post. This will prompt users to change their message notifications to the optimal settings to increase the likelihood of them seeing the messages and being able to respond.

Demo Video

Who Are We?

We are a group of undergraduate students in the University of Washington Information School working on our 2023 capstone project sponsored by Carina. In terms of the future of this project, we transferred it over to Carina to continue researching, designing, and implementing.

Meet the Team