Lightkeeper

Despite an intellectual understanding of the ageing journey, for a variety of complex reasons caregivers often find themselves in a situation where critical decisions need to be made about their parents quickly, with limited information, and under immense pressures. This is often as a result of a ‘trigger’ incident like hospitalisation or a sudden deterioration in condition. It’s difficult to overstate how complex this period of people’s lives is, there is denial, guilt, grief, loss, and a coming-to-terms (or not) with mortality. The economic value of informal care has been estimated at over $1bn per week in Australia.

The design methodology was a combination of agile, lean, and human centered design. Specifically, this involved: - Developing problem hypotheses which we took into open-ended qualitative interviews, - Built journey maps and conducted sentiment analysis on the interview results, - We then settled on a specific problem to solve, - We then moved through an iterative design process where we received feedback on three MVPs of increasing fidelity, - After three rounds of feedback we then engaged a local developer to turn our wireframes into reality, - We will continue to refine the solution based on feedback (full process: https://lightkeeper.shorthandstories.com/ and here: https://medium.com/@jack_59843/something-for-kate-an-accelerator-in-action-a28a0502b4df )

Internally, this design heralds UnitingCare’s first brave steps towards a truly customer-first innovation culture. As a small and passionate team within Queensland's second largest employer, we are excited to have been able to share a powerful, end-to-end example of customer-led design. Externally, initial reviews of the design have been favorable: “I’ve only just begun this journey. It was nice to know others have gone before me and that there are places we can turn for help." "I had a look through your Lightkeeper website and, coming from someone this applies to, I think you have done an excellent job!”

- Awarded second place in Best Social Impact category of the Deloitte Corporate Entrepreneurs Awards. - The design has been featured in an innovAGEING case study. - As far as we are aware, Lightkeeper has no direct market competition. It has been co-designed with carers and is at this point completely service agnostic (it does not directly link into UnitingCare services). - We will continue to refine and iterate the design based on customer feedback.