LifeLibrary - Solution for Care Homes

DeepInspire collaborates with LifeLibrary to develop an interactive lifestory app that preserves the stories, memories, and interests of care home residents.

About the client

LifeLibrary is an interactive lifestory app that helps care homes offer their residents the best possible person-centred care and improve the quality of life for carers, residents, and their families.

This easy-to-use, secure app preserves residents' stories, memories, and interests. It helps care homes deliver top-notch care across all five key lines of enquiry for CQC ratings - Safe, Effective, Caring, Responsive and Well-Led.

Challenge

LifeLibrary aims to lead the way in digital transformation in social care, introducing innovative solutions that use technology to enhance residents' well-being and make care home operations more efficient.

Our client faced a twofold challenge:

Challenge 1

To enhance the quality of life for residents within care homes.

Challenge 2

Aid care facilities in elevating their Care Quality Commission (CQC) ratings.

This challenge required an innovative approach to blend technology with empathy, ensuring that the solution not only preserves the memories and stories of residents but also fosteres a sense of connection and belonging within the care home community. Moreover, the solution needed to offer tangible benefits to care homes by providing them with tools to meet and exceed the standards set by regulatory bodies like the CQC.

Thus, the challenge was not merely about developing a product but about crafting a holistic solution that would empower care homes to fulfill their mission of providing compassionate and high-quality care to their residents.

Our Approach

To address the challenges faced by LifeLibrary, we employed an iterative, multi-stage approach that focused on understanding the needs of both residents and care home staff, designing an intuitive user experience, and developing a robust, scalable solution.

Let’s explore the process in more detail:

01 Discovery Phase

We began with an in-depth discovery phase to gain a thorough understanding of the unique needs and pain points of care homes and their residents. This involved:

Workshops with the client

We conducted a series of collaborative workshops with the LifeLibrary founder Sheridan Norrey to align on goals, discuss user personas, and gather insights on the specific requirements and challenges from the client’s perspective. The client was very pleased with this experience because it allowed us to collaboratively transform a raw idea into a well-defined product concept.
Meetup in the UK:

We organised a meetup at a care home in Nottingham to engage directly with residents, carers, and managers. This hands-on approach allowed us to gather valuable insights into the daily experiences and challenges faced by the care home community.
Stakeholder interviews

Conducting interviews with a diverse group of stakeholders, including care home administrators, caregivers, residents, and their families, helped us identify key requirements and areas for improvement.

02 UX Architecture

Based on the insights from the discovery phase, we designed a user experience architecture that prioritised ease of use and emotional connection. Our key activities included:

Persona development

Creating detailed personas to represent the different types of users and their specific needs.
User journey mapping

Outlining the user journey to ensure the app would be intuitive and effective in supporting residents and care home staff throughout their daily interactions.

03 Clickable Prototype

To secure investment and gather early feedback, we developed a clickable prototype that showcased the core functionalities and user experience of the LifeLibrary app. This prototype:

Demonstrated the future product:

Enabled the founder to demonstrate a live experience of the future product while it was still in the development stage, providing a tangible vision of the app's potential and capabilities to stakeholders and investors.
Visualised key features

Highlighted the app’s main features, such as story preservation, memory sharing, and interest tracking.
Facilitated user testing

Allowed us to conduct user testing sessions to validate our design choices and make iterative improvements based on real user feedback.

04 MVP Development

With the prototype validated, we proceeded to develop the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), focusing on core features that would deliver immediate value to users. The MVP development process included:

Agile methodology

Utilising agile development practices to ensure flexibility and continuous improvement throughout the development cycle.
Security and compliance

Ensuring the app met all necessary security standards and CQC requirements to protect user data and support regulatory compliance.
Feature prioritisation

Prioritising features that aligned with the CQC's five key lines of enquiry (Safe, Effective, Caring, Responsive, and Well-Led) and were essential for engaging the target audience.

Value Delivered

We collaborated with LifeLibrary to develop an interactive lifestory app that preserves the stories, memories, and interests of care home residents.

Our ongoing partnership with LifeLibrary involves providing extensive consulting and product development services to create an innovative, industry-wide solution for care homes.

The solution we delivered empowers care homes to:

Offer their residents the best possible person-centred care;
Improve the quality of life for carers, residents, and their families;
deliver top-notch care across all five key lines of enquiry for CQC ratings - Safe, Effective, Caring, Responsive and Well-Led.

If you’d like to learn more about LifeLibrary, we invite you to check out the official website - https://lifelibrary.io/

Client’s feedback

It is like being part of a team rather than a client-agency relationship.

There is no doubt in my mind that without DeepInspire, my idea would still be little more than a PowerPoint presentation. I approached them with the bare bones of the life story app with no real expertise in technology or, in fact, running a startup tech business. They have been there every step of the way.

Never feeling out of my depth and being fully involved with every part of the development has given me the confidence I need as a CEO of LifeLibrary to deliver a best-in-sector care home platform.

Sheridan Norrey CEO and Owner, LifeLibrary