Carrow
Brothers and sisters caring for a parent now share one care routine, and logging a dose takes a single tap.
Sample project. Replace with real work.
Problem
When a parent needs daily care, the work rarely sits with one person. It spreads across brothers, sisters and a neighbour who has a key. In the families we spoke to, all of that coordination ran through a group chat: Did anyone give Mum her two o’clock tablet?
Carrow’s founder had lived this. The brief was open: an app for family carers. I narrowed it to one problem we could test.
Carers can’t see at a glance what has been done today and what is still to do, so doses get doubled or missed, and one person ends up checking everything.
Research
I ran nine interviews with family carers and a two-week diary study with four families, and reviewed six medication apps they had already tried and dropped (all sample research for this placeholder project).
The group chat is where things get lost. By the evening there are eighty messages and I still don’t know if she ate.
Three findings shaped everything after this:
- Carers think in moments of the day, not in medicines. Nobody said “Amlodipine, 5mg”. They said “the one after breakfast”.
- The person doing most of the care did not want to be the manager. They wanted the others to see what was done without being asked.
- Logging happens one-handed, often while holding a cup, a plate or a parent’s arm.
User flows
The core flow had to work in under five seconds with one thumb. Everything else in the app exists to support it.
Carrow opens straight on Today. There is no dashboard to read first.
Morning, After lunch, Evening, Bedtime. A ring shows how much of the day is done.
Carers think in moments, not medicines: “the one after breakfast”, not “Amlodipine, 5mg”.
One tap logs it. No confirmation dialog: a five-second undo catches the rare wrong tap.
“Logged by Ada at 14:02” appears on the shared timeline, so nobody has to ask in the group chat.
Missing a moment had its own flow. A missed dose is the thing families feared most, but alarms in the first prototype made people anxious and they muted them within days.
The time for a moment goes by and nobody has logged it.
Alarms in the first prototype were muted within days, so the first signal is quiet and goes to one person.
Only then does the rest of the family hear about it.
Whoever is nearest logs it, and the timeline shows who stepped in.
Key decisions
Organise the app by moments of the day, not by medicine
A routine of moments: Morning, After lunch, Evening, Bedtime. Medicines live inside moments.
A medicine list with schedules, which is how most of the apps carers had dropped work.
Trade-off. Harder to set up for complex prescriptions. I added a separate medicine view for the one person who sets the routine up, so everyone else never sees it.
One tap to log, with undo instead of a confirmation
Tap a moment to mark it done. A five-second undo and a visible 'Logged by Ada at 14:02'.
A confirmation dialog on every log.
Trade-off. Accidental taps happen. In testing they were caught by the undo and by the name on the log, and the dialog had been slowing every single use to protect a rare one.
The direction I dropped was a dashboard home: tiles for medicines, appointments, notes and contacts. It looked complete in a review meeting. In first-click tests on both versions (sample), people looking for “what’s next” went to the wrong tile: eight tiles of equal weight said everything was equally urgent.
Solution
Carrow opens on Today. A ring shows how much of the day’s routine is done, and below it each moment is one row with one action. The timeline shows the same day from the family’s side: who did what, and when.
Onboarding asks three questions in plain language (who is being cared for, who helps, what does a normal day look like) and builds the routine from the answers. The person setting it up can edit everything later; nobody else has to.
Outcome
These results are placeholders until real numbers are supplied.
- In a three-week pilot with six families, every family was still logging daily in week three without reminders (sample).
- “Who gave it?” messages in family chats dropped by about half, e.g. from 30 to 14 a week (sample).
- Primary carers said they checked on their siblings less, which was the point (sample).
What I’d do next
- Test with carers who are themselves older. Our pilot skewed towards people in their thirties and forties.
- Screen reader testing. Large text was designed and tested; VoiceOver and TalkBack were checked by me, not by people who use them every day.
- Look at fairness. The timeline shows who does the most. That could help families talk about it, or it could start arguments. I’d want to find out before shipping it more widely.