Co-designing an Interactive Workforce Planning Digital Tool for the Aged Care Sector

We conducted individual exploratory interviews with 24 aged care professionals to understand their needs, expectations and barriers to achieving optimal workforce planning in the aged care sector. This helped us to understand who exactly this workforce planning tool should be for, and what goals it could help them to achieve.

This informed 10 guiding principles that would steer us throughout the rest of this project.

Following this, we collaborated with ACWIC to develop some initial concepts for the skills mix model, content design and logic of the interactive workforce planning tool. We produced these in a low-fidelity, sketch format to allow us to iterate and reform the concepts as we progressed.  

We then shared these initial concepts with aged care providers in order to validate our understanding of the problem and gather useful feedback about which parts would provide value to their workforce planning activities. 

With a clear and solid understanding of what the workforce planning tool needed to include, we began to develop more detailed content logic mapping. 

Our content strategist collaborated with our design strategists to map out the complex content logic for the tool, including the questions that would help to build a picture of an aged care organisation’s workforce. The content logic also took into account the diverse job roles, responsibilities and obligations in the aged care sector. Additionally, it helps aged care providers to forecast the requirements to meet an average of 200 minutes per resident per day, based on care provided by registered nurses, enrolled nurses and personal care workers due to be introduced in Australia in the future. 

Once the content logic was mapped out, we refined it further with ACWIC. This enabled us to ensure that the tool would ask the right questions, at the right time, in a logical order so that workforce planners could see the value in using the tool. 

In the final stages of the content logic mapping, we clearly defined what an aged care provider would see once they had completed the tool. This included an outline of their current workforce, a prediction of the future workforce needed, an explanation of the gap between the two, and how an aged care organisation could close the gap.

Following this, we moved into prototyping. Our content strategist and experience designer collaborated closely to take the content logic and translate it into wireframes, to share and validate with ACWIC and members of the working group. 

As we gathered more feedback and insights the wireframes developed from low fidelity outlines, to high fidelity prototypes. We validated the workforce planning tool’s design direction with aged care providers regularly, occasionally revisiting the content logic as we uncovered new needs or challenges. This comprehensive design and prototyping phase enabled us to rigorously explore the feasibility and functionality of every stage and feature of the tool. This was reviewed by aged care experts and professionals to ensure that the tool was valuable and accessible for both. 

Portable’s designers and developers also collaborated during this phase, to ensure that the design components would work with the build of the website. This allowed for a smooth transition during the final development phase.

We defined the technical objectives of the tool, including the need for it to be freely available to the sector, the ability to create an account and save one’s progress, and to be easily accessible for different levels of digital literacy. We also understood that ACWIC would need a content management system that they could easily update to ensure references to key resources, which could remain current and up-to-date. 

From here we defined the technical and user requirements for the workforce planning tool and selected the appropriate technical stack for the build. From here, we facilitated a workshop with the ACWIC to prioritise features and user stories. This ensured that our scope for development was aligned with their expectations and those of the working group. 

We conducted targeted user testing sessions on the data model and calculations that would drive the key outputs of the tool with several aged care providers prior to the build. This helped us to further ensure that the tool would output data that would provide practical use by the people who used it. 

The design and development teams documented acceptance criteria to accompany the designs, in order to ensure that the development phase was as smooth as possible. The acceptance criteria determined the scope and requirements to be executed by developers during the build.

The development phase was a highly concentrated part of the project - with the team building, testing and completing user acceptance testing with the Aged Care Workforce Industry Council in just 9 weeks. During this time we showcased our progress to ACWIC and the broader group of stakeholders, as well as some of the co-design participants from earlier stages, and we iterated some  elements of the tool based on their feedback.  

"Because of the diversity of aged care organisations, the tool’s content logic needed to be consistent enough so that it was easy to follow but also flexible enough to enable any aged care organisation to fill it in accurately."