PROBLEM
Caregivers who are members of the the AARP community have to leave the caregiving experience to engage in the community. This creates a fragmented experience and makes it difficult for users to return the the caregiving channel. This problem began as an assumption from our team collaboration effort to bring up the scores in one of the four main pillars we base our success. We assumed that this problem may have been a contributing factor to poor performance in our "Share Wisdom" success measure, pictured below. Solving this problem should be able to boost our numbers in this category.
AARP Caregiving Pod Measures of Success March thru June 2018.
RESEARCH
In collaboration with our Strategic Business Analyst and utilizing the testing platform Alpha, we performed usability tests with the existing product. We sampled Caregivers who engage in our community and asked them to navigate from the Caregiving sub-channel to AARP Community Caregiving section and back. We found validation for our assumption that users have a difficult time returning to the Caregiving channel after interacting to the AARP Community. We determined we could solve our problem by bringing the community interaction into the Caregiving channel so the user can stay within the experience.
At this point our stakeholders (Caregiving Pod Leader and Community Manager) were on board to pursue a solution to our problem.
PLANNING
AARP Community utilizes the Lithium platform and is housed on Lithium's servers. After researching technical feasibility in collaboration with our back end developer we discovered that Lithium offers a community API which allows us to embed a module within a page in our environment.
We elected to design and build out a component that we can drop into the CMS and utilize Lithium's API to pull data from AARP's community forums.COLLABORATIONS
Community Manager - Stakeholder representative of AARP Community Users.
Caregiving Leader - Communication of business goals.
Strategic Business Analyst - With testing platform Alpha.
Product Owner - Owner of new component builds and sprint orchestrator
Developers - Front end and back end developers.
Creative Director - Approvals on visual styles.
DESIGN & TESTING
WIREFRAMES
PROTOTYPE
VISUAL DESIGN
As 60% of AARP Caregiving visitors use a mobile device the visual design needed to be responsive to various screen sizes, to abide by AARP's existing digital style guide, and the component itself needs to be able to work within the existing Adobe CMS platform.
PLAN FOR DETERMINING IMPACT
The development has not been completed at the time this case study was published. Once this feature is implemented the plan is to cross reference back to our success measures. This will tell us if more people are interacting with the caregiving community and if they are sharing content with other caregivers.