Three things we learned from talking to our users
Recently we reached out to Comfort Life users, asking for feedback on how we’ve helped them and how we can improve. Here are three key insights I want to share from what they told me:
1. Transparency and clarity are critical
Jasmine Nadarajah, a community support worker in the Health Network, used our site to find a convalescent stay for a client. She loved that “the price was shown up front and was obvious. If I go onto a retirement home’s website, they usually ask to call for a quote. On Comfort Life, the prices are presented as 'starting from.' I could go back to the patient and say ‘Here is the base cost’.”
Being busy, she didn’t have time to call around to different retirement homes. She “found what [she] was looking for on Comfort Life” and reached out to a community that met her client’s needs.
Judy McDonald is a senior searching for a new place to live who has used ComfortLife.ca throughout her research. Like Jasmine, what crystalized the effectiveness of our site for her was that “You show prices!” She followed that up with an effusive “Thank you!”
She also complained that “many retirement homes aren't forthcoming in their pricing.”
2. People research outside their local area, finding that convenient
Judy was looking in the Hamilton-Burlington area but also considered Kitchener-Waterloo and places further from home. The map search was especially helpful for her. “It was easy to select a residence and open up a new page in my browser. I could keep the ones I was interested in open in separate tabs” then easily compare them. “Everything is located in the same spot and the format of the page is standard. Whether it's an activity or a floor plan or pricing or a menu or square footage or whatever it is, I can go from tab to tab and see what the differences are.”
She’s been using ComfortLife.ca for months, which, in turn, speaks to the fact that this is a challenging decision for people who need all the help they can get. She’s still looking. So is Tony Tighe, a 60-ish Calgarian searching for senior living for his mom.
Tony first considered helping his mom move to Calgary but ran into roadblocks with the application processes of retirement homes and the magnitude of moving provinces. He’s now researching options in Greater Vancouver from his Alberta home, again using ComfortLife.ca. “I don’t need to go to each website from cold,” he says. “Having a list of places with pictures and information is great. I just go down the list, looking at each, finding the ones that fit the criteria I’m looking for, and then, making note of those, going to the website, or reading your summaries and getting more background.”
3. People crave objective, unbiased information
It’s a stressful time and a difficult decision. Stress comes from a combination of watching a parent or loved one falter, feeling the need to help and make a good decision, and for many people, knowing little or nothing about senior living. People like Tony are surprised and grateful to find a website that gives a “list and an overview,” as he put it.
For him and others, Comfort Life truly became “a trusted source.” (Their words, not just ours.) "In the end, out of your site, I’ve picked four or five,” said Tony. “It's really well laid out and it's a very useful site. I didn't go to any other sites, I'll be honest with you: I kept using yours. If you're doing a search, you have to have all the answers for your family member, or your loved ones, and I found them on Comfort Life."
Judy says it like this: “When you're on a computer you just keep Googling and checking links but when I found Comfort Life, I stuck with it.” She liked the maps on landing pages and “the fact that I could look at a region and see all the different types of homes that are there.… I could see where they were all located.… I had Comfort Life open for a month or two.” She would go out and tour communities and then come back with new questions and “go through the tabs again” from ComfortLife.ca.
Angelica Aguilera is searching for a retirement home for her mother. ComfortLife.ca “gave us a place where we could learn everything from an unbiased perspective.” It has “everything you need to know, up-to-date advice, and genuine information that’s organic and answers the questions I had. It was a relief to us.”
As with Tony and Judy, it became a “one-stop shop” for her, helping her “understand differences between each community’s options.… Knowing that some places could accommodate mom through changes in her needs was very helpful.” She toured retirement homes using our Retirement Tour Guide and was effusive about this resource alone.
“It’s really difficult for us to make this decision, then to do the tours” and like many, she felt “overwhelmed. So having the list of questions makes it less overwhelming.… If you don’t have a base, you go in blind,” she said. For her, ComfortLife.ca truly became a trusted source. “I saw it from a perspective of ‘I can trust what I’m reading’... looking at a retirement home is a heck of a lot harder than trying to find a condo … and Comfort Life [has been] the MLS for retirement communities.”
