Homewatch CareGivers: Rebuilding Trust in the Home Care Search

Overview

Homewatch CareGivers is a 45+ year-old in-home senior care franchise with locations across the U.S. Families come to the site during one of the hardest moments in their lives — trying to find safe, trustworthy care for a parent or spouse, often on a deadline. At the same time, the same site has to recruit and retain the caregivers who actually deliver that care. Two audiences, opposite emotional states, one homepage.

The Problem

Going into this project, Homewatch's own marketing leadership couldn't fully describe their own site. The Sr. Director of Marketing put it plainly: the site had grown into "two dozen service offerings without clear structure," stacked on top of "seven subscription levels" and a six-tier care matrix (Active, Wellness, Personal Transition, Care on Demand, Specialized, Private Duty Nursing). Franchisees were telling corporate that competitors' sites looked cleaner and simpler by comparison.

Underneath the IA problem was a trust problem. Families vetting a stranger to enter their home or a parent's home wanted background-check details, real caregiver profiles, and honest pricing; what they found was stock photography, thin service descriptions, and no cost information. On the other side, prospective caregivers, often comparing multiple job offers at once, hit a broken Indeed integration that defaulted to Kentucky job listings regardless of where they actually lived, with no visible pay ranges to judge an offer against.

The Goal

Give three audiences — care recipients researching for themselves, family decision-makers researching for someone else, and prospective caregivers job-hunting — a fast, honest path to the specific thing they came for, without forcing any of them to wade through the other two audiences' content first.

Why this? Why now?

Complexity was costing trust, not just time

A cross-platform heatmap analysis of the existing site showed how badly the current structure was losing people before they ever reached a decision point. Only 42% of desktop visitors, 49% of tablet visitors, and 37% of mobile visitors scrolled past the midpoint of a typical service page — and each platform had its own cliff (desktop dropped from 73% to 51% of visitors right after the timeline section; mobile dropped from 76% to 51% between 25–40% scroll depth). Whatever we wanted people to see had to live above those thresholds, not below them.

At the same time, a full technical/SEO audit turned up 974 pages blocked from crawling and 151 broken internal links — evidence that the content sprawl wasn't just a UX problem, it was structural.

Discovery: Clients & Family Members

My research process combined moderated usability sessions with care recipients and family decision-makers, a synthesized affinity map of every session, and a competitive/heatmap analysis of the existing site — all validated against Homewatch's own stakeholder priorities before we touched a wireframe.

What we heard, over and over

Across sessions with a range of participants — from a 64-year-old care recipient researching options for herself, to a 47-year-old family decision-maker coordinating her mother's care from a distance — a handful of pain points came up independent of who we were talking to:

• No pricing, anywhere. Every care-recipient participant expected to find at least a ballpark cost under "Services" and found nothing. Understanding Medicare and Social Security coverage was the single biggest open question for decision-makers.
• Stock photos undercut everything else. "I want to see individual caregiver profiles with photos, detailed qualifications, certifications, experience levels, locations, and specializations," one decision-maker told us — a near word-for-word echo across multiple sessions.
• Reviews felt staged. Star ratings without content weren't trusted; several participants said outright that Google reviews carried more weight with them than on-site testimonials.
• The autoplay video with music on the homepage was universally disliked and mentioned unprompted in nearly every session.

Validating our hunches with numbers

We baseline-tested the existing site with the System Usability Scale and a 1–5 likelihood-to-recommend question across all 14 research participants. The site actually scored a respectable 85/100 on SUS — well above the commonly-cited industry average of 68 — which told us the core interaction patterns weren't broken. The trust and clarity gaps were the real issue: care recipients, the group most exposed to the pricing and trust-signal gaps, rated their likelihood to recommend the site at just 3.8 out of 5, noticeably lower than decision-makers (4.5) or prospective caregivers (4.4). That gap became our north star for this half of the project — the people with the most at stake trusted the site the least.

Final design: A site that shows its work

From 24 services to three tiers

The service catalog was restructured from an unstructured, decades-grown list into three clear tiers — Essential Care, Specialized Care, and Recovery-Focused Care — each with plainly-named services underneath (24-Hour Care, Active Care, Care on Demand, Childcare, Personal Care, Respite Care, Wellness Care). A user can now see the full shape of what Homewatch offers in one glance, then drill into condition-specific pages (chronic conditions, dementia & Alzheimer's) built around the exact search behavior we saw in sessions.

Pricing, out in the open

We shipped a dedicated Home Care Costs & Payment Options page that leads with a real number — the nationwide average cost of in-home care exceeds $4,500/month — before walking through what actually moves that number up or down, and how Homewatch's free consultation turns that estimate into a firm one. It's not a rate card, because rates genuinely vary by hours and acuity, but it replaces "nothing" with an honest starting point, directly answering the pain point every care-recipient participant raised.

Real people, real ratings, real answers

The homepage hero now leads with an actual caregiver and client photographed together, a visible 4.8 review rating pulled from third-party platforms (presnted with brand credentials), and a single zip-code field that auto-detects the visitor's location ("Ann Arbor," in our example market) with a one-click way to change it — replacing the old pattern of generic imagery and a location tool users had to hunt for. FAQ accordions replace walls of text on service pages, directly addressing the "too many words" and "wanted anchor links/tab menus" feedback we heard repeatedly. A live chat option — staffed by people, not just a bot — now sits on every page, answering both "care options" and "employment opportunities" in one place, which matters because our research showed those two audiences don't sort themselves into separate parts of the site on their own.

Discovery: Prospective caregivers

Where the client-facing research was about trust, the caregiver-facing research was about speed and honesty. The prospective caregivers we spoke with — several already certified, in-home care providers — were actively comparing Homewatch to two or three other job postings at the same time, and every extra minute of friction was a real risk of losing them to a faster-moving competitor.

The Indeed problem

The site's job listings redirected through Indeed to a Kentucky-based feed regardless of the applicant's actual location — every single caregiver participant hit this, and none of them found it obvious that they needed to manually re-search by city. Ross Fangio, Homewatch's Workforce Solutions & Training Manager, confirmed this wasn't just a research artifact: "speed to hire is extremely important... if you don't move them along in the process fast enough, someone else will make an offer."

The money question, left unanswered

Every prospective caregiver we spoke with wanted pay ranges, benefits (health insurance, 401(k), PTO), and training/certification information visible before they'd invest time in an application — none of it was findable on the existing site. As one caregiver persona summarized it: "I want to know what benefits I'll be getting... this can be things like health insurance, 401K, holidays, PTO, training, certifications, career development."

Final design: A job board that respects the applicant's time

Location-aware, by default

Caregiver Jobs now runs on a dedicated, location-aware job board rather than a broken Indeed redirect. Landing on the careers page from the Ann Arbor site surfaces Ann Arbor listings immediately, with a keyword and mile-radius filter for anyone who wants to widen or narrow the search — no manual re-entry of a city required.

Pay right in the listing

Hourly pay now appears directly in job titles and listing details ("Weekend Premium Morning 9am–11am and Afternoon Shifts 5p-7p @$17.50/hr") instead of being withheld until an interview. This was the single most-requested piece of missing information across every caregiver session, and it's now the first thing an applicant sees.

A dedicated caregivers section

A new top-level "Caregivers" area of the site (About Our Caregivers, Caregiver Jobs, Caregiver Support, Caregiver Training) gives the recruiting journey its own home instead of burying it inside client-facing service content — directly addressing Nate's early call for "better differentiation between customer journey vs. caregiver recruitment."

A call I had to make

Early drafts kept a "quick apply, we'll follow up" option to avoid asking caregivers to leave the site for the job board. The internal team was clear, though, that speed-to-hire and application tracking mattered more than keeping applicants on-domain — a caregiver who has to wait an extra day to hear back is a caregiver another agency has already hired. We made the trade-off to route job seekers to a purpose-built ATS/job board rather than a lighter-weight on-site form, prioritizing hiring velocity over a marginally smoother handoff.

Impact

What we can verify today

The redesign shipped with the specific fixes the research called for: the service catalog went from roughly two dozen loosely-organized offerings to 3 tiers and clearly-labeled & organized subcategory services; the previously-nonexistent pricing page now anchors expectations with a real number; the broken Kentucky-defaulting Indeed redirect was replaced with a location-aware job board that shows pay in-listing; and the autoplay video, stock photography, and star-ratings-without-content that every session flagged are gone.

What we don't have yet

I don't have post-launch analytics (conversion rate, lead volume, applicant completion rate) from Homewatch to report a before/after lift — that data sits with their internal marketing team and wasn't part of what I had access to for this write-up. The honest framing is: baseline usability was already solid (SUS 85), the redesign targeted the trust and clarity gaps specifically identified in research, and the shipped site directly resolves the highest-frequency, highest-severity issues from the affinity map. Validating the actual lift in conversion and applicant completion is the natural next step, and I'd only report a number here once I could stand behind it.

Beyond launch

This project sharpened something I keep coming back to in my work: usability scores can look fine while trust is quietly leaking out through the gaps — a missing price, a stock photo, a star rating with nothing behind it. The fix isn't always a bigger redesign; sometimes it's just refusing to let the site stay silent on the three or four things people actually came to ask.

Design Elements

Homewatch CareGivers Homepage for Desktop (1440px) and Mobile (375px)

Click here to view the live site!