Talea Group · Product Manager & UX/UI Designer
Healthcare operations
Helping caregivers and office managers streamline daily tasks and cross-organizational communication.
Goal
Design a multi-platform solution supporting caregivers during daily tours, and office managers coordinating tasks and patient updates.
The challenge
Caregivers had limited digital literacy, inconsistent communication, and difficulty tracking patient progress in real time. The office team lacked visibility into daily tours and struggled to ensure tasks were completed correctly and on time.
Discovery
4 inputs01. Target users · interviews and field visits
Two audiences with opposite constraints, working from the same information.
Caregivers
Home-care professionals aged 25–65, no academic education, low digital skills. Motivated by guided task flows and reminders. Working from a smartphone in the field, so they need a mobile-first design that shows key medical information (allergies, medication) instantly.
Office managers (PDL)
Oversee caregivers and patients, aged 25–65, moderate desktop skills, working from an office. They need efficient task management, fast communication, full visibility and opportunity discovery: a desktop-first platform that assigns, tracks and confirms tasks across multiple caregivers.
02. Benchmarking
Everyone had scheduling solved. Nobody had the patient at the centre.
- Good at scheduling and messaging.
- Weak in patient-centric workflows.
- Lacked transparency across caregiver–manager communication.
Competitor analysis · 5 platforms
03. UX laws & best practices
When your user has low digital literacy, the textbook stops being theory.
- Progressive disclosure: show only what's relevant at each step.
- Miller's law: group patient info into clear, memorable chunks.
- Error prevention: confirm critical actions and allow undo.
- Consistency: align mobile and desktop flows for a smooth handoff.
- Accessibility: large text, high contrast, clear icons.
HCI literature
04. Key insights
A carer's day needs one clear route, not a system to navigate.
- Caregivers need a clear daily tour to reduce cognitive load.
- Patient info (allergies, medication) must be front and centre.
- Communication and task tracking work best combined.
- Office managers require full transparency.
What made it hard
- Designing for low digital literacy without losing depth.
- Balancing mobile simplicity against desktop control.
- Managing language and terminology clarity.
- Encouraging adoption in a traditional industry.
Requirements it produced
- A seamless mobile-to-desktop flow for caregivers and office staff.
- Clear, simple task flows.
- Critical patient information displayed with hierarchy.
- Large touch targets to support low digital literacy.
Design
Two apps, one handoffUser flows
Two flows that have to meet in the middle.
Caregivers · mobile app
Value: enables caregivers to work with confidence, save time and reduce mistakes.
PDLs · desktop app
Value: keeps management in full control, ensures transparency, and supports seamless collaboration with field staff.
Design system
Built on MUI React, bent to fit a carer's hands.
Talea was built on MUI React components, customised to fit caregiver workflows, which mostly meant larger targets, stronger hierarchy and fewer choices per screen than the defaults assume.
Solution · Care App, for carers in the field
Mobile
The whole day on one screen, then one patient at a time.
- Route plan and estimated time.
- Patient information.
- Send and receive requests and messages.
- Required services.
Solution · “My Talea”, for the office
Desktop 01. Task page
Decision: a dual-pane layout for managing a workload
Tasks categorised by type, filtered by status and assignment, in a dual-pane layout built for working through a queue, with quick actions, task creation, and a rich preview carrying the metadata that decides priority.
Desktop 02. Patient page
Decision: scope the same task list to one patient
A patient summary panel with the task list scoped to that patient, filterable by type, with status and ownership controls and inline task management, so a manager can work patient-first or queue-first without switching product.
Task dialog
One timeline per task, so nothing is decided in a side channel.
- Task type, assignee and due date at a glance.
- All updates and decisions in one timeline.
- Avatars and initials showing who wrote each message.
- Quick replies, mentions and attachments in place.
- A Complete task button to close the loop fast.
Testing & roll-out
Observed, translated, iteratedPrototype and usability testing
Every session ran through a translator, and the notes still changed the design.
To make sure the app would actually be used, we prototyped it and observed users completing tasks with it. All users were German speakers, so the team joined the sessions, translated live and took notes. From those notes I prepared the second iteration of the design, which shipped as our MVP.
Roll-out and onboarding
In a traditional industry, adoption is a design deliverable.
We prepared a dedicated onboarding day to bring users onto the app for a first test run, which mattered more here than in most products, because the constraint was never the interface, it was confidence.
Looking back
This is the project where I held product manager and designer at once, and the two roles pulled in the same direction: the hardest problems weren't interface problems. Low digital literacy, a traditional industry, and users I could only reach through a translator meant every decision had to be defensible in plain language before it could be defensible in Sketch. The UI was refreshed in 2025; the structure underneath is the one built in 2018.