WA Cares Fund –Ensuring working Washingtonians have access to long-term care.
Role
UX Design · UX Research
Team
Sara Gooch + Constance Smith + Andrewnet Cain + Daniel Feldman + Vanessa Guerrero Barragán
Context
Client: Washington State Department of Social and Health Services
Focus: Civic Design · Long-Term Care
Duration: 2022 — 2023 · Ongoing
Overview
Opportunity
WA Cares Fund, a first of its kind public long-term care program changing the way the whole country thinks about aging with dignity, was set to launch for public contributions starting in July 2023. In preparation for this, the WA Cares/DSHS team needed to overhaul the existing website with a more human-centered approach to educating Washingtonians about the fund. Due to poor dissemination of information when the fund was initially announced to the public, residents being confronted with the option to definitely “opt-in” or “opt-out” into the fund, and political tensions, there was a lack of awareness, misunderstanding, and frustration from the public about the fund.
Outcome
We used a human-centered approach to establish a comprehensive, easy-to-use website that clearly articulates the value and potential impact of the program, and applicable information for how Washingtonians can contribute and utilize the benefit. Our work was informed, and validated, through interviews with Washingtonians across the state, along with rich collaborative working sessions with the WA Cares Fund/DSHS team. To support the WA Cares Fund’s value of equity, diversity, accessibility and inclusion, we also conducted research with Washington’s Latin/Hispanic population, to learn how to best make the WA Cares Fund experience accessible to them.
Approach
Research + Validation
To better understand the public’s current impressions of the fund, we conducted research interviews with a diverse range of Washingtonians to identify the gaps the new public website would need to address. We spoke with people who would be beneficiaries of the fund, those who would contribute and be able to utilize the fund in the future. And those who could be authorized representatives, often those caring for and managing care for a loved one and could help their loved one receive benefits.
Design + Refine
Taking the insights we learned from research, we used these to design a new approach to the WA Cares Fund website. We conducted multiple rounds of validation and usability testing to ensure that the core concepts of the fund were being communicated clearly. We used this iterative process to refine the site and language around how we talk about the fund to make it as accessible as possible.
Build
Because contributions to the fund were beginning July 2023, the site we designed needed to be built to launch in June 2023. We worked closely with the WA Cares Fund team’s development partner to ensure we were designing a site that could launch on time, which provided design constraints and informed design iterations.
Output
Making the value proposition clear
As a first of its kind long-term care benefit for Washingtonians, the WA Cares Fund had a lot of explaining to do to make it clear to working Washingtonians what the fund was, why they were contributing, and how the fund would benefit their long-term care. We learned in our research that the term “long-term care” was not something many people framed their thinking around or understood. The way the WA Cares Fund defines long-term care is any service or support for individuals who need assistance with tasks of daily living whether the condition is temporary, like injuries from a car accident, or permanent, like a diagnosed condition. This led us to de-emphasize the term when people first landed on the site as to not cause initial confusion. We also created a page explaining the term “long-term care” and the concept that each of us one day will need care, and it does not always happen when we are old and near the end of our lives, as many people associated it with.
Illustrating the circuitous path to benefits
One of the important exercises we had to do was explore the ways we could visualize how the fund works. The general concept is that you contribute to the fund, meet your contribution requirement, and therefore have access to utilize the $36,500 benefit whenever you need care. While this may seem straight forward, the path to utilizing your benefit is not linear. In order to utilize your $36,500, you must have a qualifying care need or event that requires long-term care. You could choose to use your benefit over time for multiple qualifying care needs, which would require applying to utilize the benefit multiple times until you’ve spent your benefit to $0. Because the $36,500 benefit is accessible as one lump-sum, once you’ve spent the entirety of your benefit, you no longer can utilize it.
Addressing the comment “$35,600 is not enough”
While we were conducting research, many participants were initially dismayed by the amount you received from the fund and how it was a fixed amount they could access. With the rising costs of care, the main value of the fund was to provide every working Washingtonian with access to some financial support during care events that are often sudden and costly. During our research we had many people wondering what they could use the fund for, we addressed this feedback by creating a section called “care receipts” that showed three different stories and examples of how people utilized the $36,500 benefit. Not only did this help demonstrate the many ways you could use the benefit, but also helped illuminate how much care costs.
Demonstrating the proportion of contributions
We needed to clarify a lot of confusion around how contributions work. Working Washingtonians contribute 0.58% from every paycheck towards the fund. Once they’ve contributed to the fund for 10 years, they are able to access their benefit of $36,500 throughout their lifetime for qualifying care needs. The biggest challenge we faced was showing how little Washingtonians actually contribute to the fund throughout their contributions in proportion to the benefit they receive from the fund. To try to demonstrate this, we incorporated a contributions calculator to show how much of your annual salary goes towards your contributions to the fund every year, in hopes of clarifying that instead of contributing towards your benefit amount, you’re contributing for duration and getting more than what you put into the fund.
The power of hearing from other Washingtonians
To build trust in the fund, an approach we found really resonated with Washingtonians, was seeing people’s stories. We spoke with people taking care of loved ones, people who’ve seen someone in their life care for someone, and people thinking about their potential roles as caregivers in the future. Everyone had a story about how hard and challenging it can be to be a caregiver, how often there are little resources to help alleviate the physical, mental, and financial strain it can cause. Highlighting caregiver stories helped show how the WA Cares Fund will be able to provide some of that relief for caregivers, and to inspire Washingtonians about the benefit of the fund.
Language equity for accessibility
As the only Washingtonian and Spanish speaker on the team, I was put in a unique position to manage and run an in-person design and research program in the greater Seattle area focused on bringing a Spanish language prototype of the WA Cares Fund site to the Latin/Hispanic community in Washington. I worked with a native Spanish speaking researcher and together we conducted interviews to understand the experiences of Spanish speakers navigating government benefits today, hear their sentiments and reactions towards the WA Cares Fund, and cull their feedback on the Spanish version of the website in order to make it as accessible and culturally competent as possible.
Reflections & Impact
Crafting a more human-centered experience for navigating government benefits
In our validation research, I asked people about their experience applying and utilizing existing government benefits like Unemployment, Disability (SSDI), EBT/SNAP, Social Security, and Medicare/Medicaid. Over and over again, I heard about the challenges and frustrations people had accessing benefits they really need. It made me realize why taking a human-centered approach to the WA Cares Fund was so important, because it often doesn’t exist in the systems people use today.
I’m excited to see the WA Cares Fund lead by example with supporting long-term care, I hope it will inspire other states to do the same, because we all deserve access to care.