As requested by the homecare services company, Waverley designed, engineered and built a cross-platform mobile solution for schedule verification, communication, booking and cancelling of appointments, payment requests, etc.
Addus is a national provider of home care services with more than 300 home care contracts throughout the country, 30,000 consumers weekly and 120 offices located in 21 states. Addus began working with Waverley in early 2013 to design and build the Addus Mobile Portal (AMP) to allow employees with iOS and Android smartphones efficiently manage their client relationships and internal communications without having to make phone calls. Additionally, AMP has been designed to track lists of open, scheduled, and completed visits, announcements and message transcripts, and payroll information – all with one single app.
Addus needed to offer their employees an efficient and reliable mobile solution that would enable schedule verification, communication with management, booking and cancelling of appointments, payment requests and updating their personal information without having to call or drive to the office. Waverley Software was asked to help and was ultimately engaged in both the design and engineering efforts. What followed was an intensive and highly collaborative, multi-month effort that has changed the way business works with employees and customers, resulting in improved satisfaction and reduced administrative costs.
In order to design and rapidly implement a beta release of the AMP smartphone app we:
The first release included a CSS framework, locked-down browser, login page and several “first-time” mobile features such as a Messages, Completed and Future Visits screens, and Get More Visits, by means of which Addus employees can book new appointments directly from their mobile device. To improve the user experience on this cross-platform app, Waverley also developed custom controls such as date/time picker wheel and a “chat view” in the Messages screen. AMP was then beta-tested with a limited group of users in several Addus locations across the US.
All project work was done using Agile software development. Daily scrums were employed to coordinate the efforts of all team members, with Addus developing the back-end logic and stored procedures while Waverley used provided data to develop the AMP screens. User stories were developed jointly. This approach helped everyone to respond in a timely fashion to changing requirements and avoid redundant design work.
The original design request provided by Addus was missing some specific peculiarities of mobile platforms, so Waverley suggested a free prototype, made in less than a week, containing our app usability recommendations. After reviewing this version, presenting a few draft screens and controls for Addus app, the client ordered a full-scale UI/UX design. The main challenge was that the Javascript-based app supported older versions of Android and iOS. In order to maintain the balance between the app performance and user experience, we designed and developed a delicate and elegant user interface, containing no complex animations, but beautiful in its simplicity.
A Triage meeting was conducted each week between Product Owner, QA Lead and Tech Lead(s). The QA Lead organized the meeting. During the meeting each bug was analyzed and discussed. Updates were captured in the bug tracking system. Frequency of these meetings depended on the project schedule, number of bugs, team availability, etc.
This new technology allows Addus employees to be more productive, more flexible, and focus on making a bigger difference in ensuring the wellbeing of their clients. The app we created enabled more efficient home care, improving the lives of customers, the workflow of home care aides, and the overall business of our client.