Case study · 2024–present
Cera is the UK's largest home-care provider. I'm a senior front-end engineer on the Digital Care Platform: the web app carers, clinical and operations staff use to plan, deliver and audit tens of thousands of daily home visits. I also lead development of the iOS app that keeps families in the loop about their loved ones' care.
Cera delivers home care at national scale: tens of thousands of visits a day, in houses across the UK, by carers working long shifts in other people's homes. The software I work on has to hold up in that environment. It gets used on a phone, one-handed, in a kitchen, while someone is also trying to remember a medication schedule. It gets used on a laptop by a care coordinator juggling four urgent issues at once. It gets looked at by a family member who just wants to know that mum is okay today.
My focus is two surfaces of that world. The Digital Care Platform is the web application the operations and clinical teams use to plan, deliver and audit care. The family iOS app is the way a son or daughter or partner sees what happened at today's visit, asks a question, and feels a bit calmer. Both are trying to do the same thing at different distances from the person receiving care: make the work legible, so the right thing happens, and nothing important gets missed.
Care workers are the primary users: busy, often mid-task, not necessarily confident with technology. Interfaces need to be obvious at a glance, recover gracefully from interruptions, and never demand reading when the right next step could just be obvious. I write a lot of code to keep complexity off their screens.
Families don't want a firehose of data; they want to know things are alright and to be able to reach someone when they aren't. The iOS app is designed to answer the one question most people are actually asking: “how was today?” Everything else sits one tap away for when it's needed.
The audience spans carers, clinicians, older adults, and people with a wide range of devices, connections and needs. Accessibility is the baseline, not the bonus: keyboard navigation, screen-reader support, high-contrast modes, reduced motion, and honest performance on modest phones.
Home care isn't glamorous software. It's a lot of small interactions done well, every day, for people who rely on them. The stakes are ordinary and high at the same time: someone gets their medication on time, someone's daughter knows they're fine, someone's shift ends at a sensible hour.