Striking the right balance of care

Many young and middle-aged workers combine both work and caregiving responsibilities that cover not only children but extend to parents and pets. Research shows that employees who achieve greater work-family balance are more satisfied in their jobs and happier with their families. For our client, a leading provider of work-life services, the key to enabling that balance is the setting up of care schedules for dependent or vulnerable family members.

The client’s existing solution for managing such schedules, however, was not user-friendly, flexible, or mobile-responsive. The client's websites offered no provision to schedule premium services for care. The websites were served by a Liferay V6.2 content management system (CMS) as the common backend for which support ended in December 2020.

We designed and developed a web platform for scheduling care for family members including parents, children, self and pets, with e-mail notifications and quick access to customer care. We migrated the websites to Liferay DXP7.2 CMS backend. To improve the performance of the web application, we developed website forms as AngularJS-based single-page applications. We developed a responsive website that worked flawlessly across different-sized screens on desktops, tablets and mobile phones.

We used Agile methodologies right from the requirements-gathering phase until the final deployment of the web platform to shorten development time. To save cost and time, we used an almost identical codebase for both iOS and Android platforms (except for a few configuration settings and device specific features). Furthermore, our team performed continuous integration using automated build tools, and script and code repositories, to save time during the development, testing and deployment phases. We ensured that the sites we built followed the WCAG 2.0 and OWASP accessibility and security standards.

• The web platform we developed ensured the client’s care scheduling interface was user-friendly, flexible and mobile-responsive.
• Customers could easily create, change and cancel schedules. They also had easy access to records and historical data.
• The common codebase across iOS and Android ensured significant cost savings in the development and maintenance of the application.
• Agile methodologies and a high degree of automation reduced costs and shortened the development time.