Caregiver onboarding

Company: Sittercity
Sector: Marketplace, childcare
My Role: Senior Product Designer- end-to-end design, user research, stakeholder alignment
Project Time: 6 months

Overview

Sittercity's marketplace serves as a vital connection point between families seeking care and qualified caregivers looking for meaningful work. The platform facilitates relationships across multiple care types, including childcare, senior care, special needs care, pet care, and housekeeping. Each month, thousands of potential caregivers begin their journey on our platform, making the onboarding experience a critical business driver.

The caregiver onboarding process is more complex than many users anticipate. Due to the requirements of the business caregivers must:

  1. Create an account with basic demographic information

  2. Build the basics of a profile that helps them stand out to families

  3. Verify their identity to ensure safety on the platform

High-level project goals:

  • Increase overall conversion of childcare caregivers through the onboarding funnel

    • Specifically increase Registration-to-Application Rate: Elevate the rate to 53% (current: 37%)

  • Enhance User Retention: Boost overall retention by providing an engaging onboarding journey

The initial challenge- tech debt

Despite its business importance, our caregiver onboarding flow faced two significant challenges:

  • Poor conversion rates were limiting platform growth

  • The legacy codebase made iterations slow and costly

After analyzing the situation, I proposed that modernizing the technical foundation before pursuing innovative solutions was our best strategic decision. This would enable faster iteration and testing of future improvements.

The childcare onboarding flow was fairly straightforward.

However, the non-childcare onboarding flows were multiple generations behind. My first task in modernization would be aligning all of the flows in design consistency.

First step to modernization, simplification

I first focused on implementing our design system across key onboarding touch-points:

  • The account creation page

  • The caretype selection interface

  • The profile creation form ( aka. the “megaform")

I mapped all the information we collected in onboarding onto a singular set of pages to establish a consistent flow across the caretypes (childcare, pet care, companion care, and housekeeping).

The biggest challenge was collapsing the various pages into a singular megaform across different care types. This significantly improved development efficiency allowing the team to build a reusable singular form. I mapped all the inputs into categories and then designed the form to be able to flex for each data set.

Wherever you go, there you are

After 3 months of excellent development work, a new version of caregiver onboarding was launched. Despite improvements in speed, stability, and visual consistency, Post-launch data revealed that modernization alone hadn't moved the needle on conversion rates.

Data-driven discovery

I conducted a comprehensive analysis of user behavior, revealing three key insights:

  • The initial sign-up page had concerning abandonment rates

  • The megaform showed significant user drop-off

  • Identity verification was the final major point of friction in the flow

Through heatmaps and session recordings, I observed users struggling particularly with the bio section. The data suggested users were experiencing cognitive overload throughout the profile creation process.

I began to ideate potential solutions and found that my ideas ranged vastly. I realized I was relying too much on the granularity of the metrics we were trying to drive with no vision of what the actual goal of onboarding was.

Stepping back to create a philosphy

I had a wealth of potential ideas for how we could approach the problems we had discovered. In order to narrow down the ideas, I decided I needed to step back and think more holistically about onboarding. I mapped out our unique challenges and goals before finally defining what onboarding meant for us.

Our unique challenges

What is our “Aha” moment for caregivers?

What is our onboarding?

Our onboarding mission is to seamlessly transition users from signup to job discovery. We strive to create that powerful 'aha' moment when users, armed with their newly crafted profiles, realize the potential of our platform to transform their job search.

This philosophy helped clarify our approach. We still needed to provide sitters a foundation of a profile, but we needed to help them. Given this in addition to technical and time constraints, improving the megaform was our most valuable problem to solve.

Our approach focused on two core principles:

  • Reduce cognitive load at each step

  • Maintain user motivation throughout the journey

Designing for mobile-first users

Now with a focus on the megaform an interesting paradox in form design came to light. Conventional wisdom suggests minimizing the number of steps in a flow, but our data pointed to cognitive load as the real conversion killer. Users weren't abandoning because of too many steps – they were overwhelmed by the complexity of decisions they needed to make at each step

Following this hypothesis I began by breaking down the megaform into single-question pages.

Knowing that more than 80% of our users came to Sittercity on their phone, I prioritized designing for finger clickable interactions. I replaced checkboxes with larger, scannable tokens leveraging icons and text for easy reading. I also added a progress stepper to help motivate sitters through the flow.

User-centered refinement through testing

I ran unmoderated user testing to find out how real caregivers would handle the flow. The results validated our initial approach while suggesting more opportunities for improvments

  1. Language clarity was essential

  2. The more complex screens needed contextual hints and examples

  3. Sitters benefited from additional motivation to get them through tougher steps

Building motivation into the experience

Early in my research, I discovered that motivation often dipped at predictable points in the flow. Rather than accepting this as a normal drop-off, I saw an opportunity to actively maintain user engagement through strategic placement of encouraging messages and real-world job opportunities. This approach transformed potentially frustrating moments into opportunities for engagement.

Despite it adding an additional screen I hypothesized that an introduction screen would help prepare caregivers for the tasks they needed to complete.

I knew that finding a job was the key driver that brings caregivers to the platform. Before asking them to undertake the most difficult screens I reminded them of their goal on the other side of it.

Impact & results: Measuring success

The redesigned onboarding flow not only improved completion rates but also enhanced the quality of caregiver profiles.

The redesigned onboarding flow achieved:

  • 20% increase in overall conversion

  • Improved completion rates for the bio section

  • Reduction of 3 minutes off the overall flow completion time

Lessons & future visions

Reflections

  1. Complexity reduction doesn't always mean fewer steps

  2. Mobile optimization requires rethinking traditional form patterns

  3. Strategic placement of motivation elements helps maintain momentum

Future visions

  1. Personalized paths: Caregivers arrive from different paths in the upper funnel. A more personalized path for these different users might more effectively capture these users.

  2. AI-assisted bio writing: Even with the help we’ve given sitters, writing their bio is still challenging. AI tools would allowed us to give them more assistance with this task

  3. Identity verification iteration: IDV still poses the next largest dropoff point