HOSPITAL STANDARDIZATION PROJECT
A research project to learn what information is most important to the visitors of hospital websites.
THE PROBLEM
Northwell Health is a large health system in the Northeast that owns 22 hospitals in various parts of Long Island, Queens, Staten Island, Manhattan and Westchester.
There was no uniform way for our hospital locations to be built on our website. Hospitals had vastly differing IA's and designs. They all featured different kinds of content. We decided that it would be important during our Drupal 8 migration to create a standardization strategy so that they hospital could have uniform user-centric experience that was the same though all the Northwell Health hospitals while still giving the hospital the flexibility to customize there pages to feature what is important to them.
HIGH LEVEL TIMELINE
We worked on this project over the course of 2 months.
KEY GOAL
Create a uniform hospital website platform that connected to the master brand while also giving the hospitals the freedom to showcase what was important to them.
MY ROLE
For this projected I conducted many varieties if user research including, conducting user interviews, tree test survey, card sort survey, in person card sort, first click testing, and analytics analysis.
I then used all my research to make an informed and user centric information architecture for the hospitals to follow. I also created design templates to be used to key pages on the hospital sites including the homepage and the patient and visitor information pages that were first click tested to make sure that the information was easy for the users to find.
UNDERSTANDING THE USER
My goal was to make the sites as user-centric as possible. When a user is looking for information about a hospital the users wanted to be able to get to the important information quickly.
Through out this process the best user information we got was from interviewing users and people who work on the front lines in the hospitals. We found one of the biggest pain points was wayfinding. A lot of these hospitals are very large and there is not a lot of information online about where entrances are located and where a visitor should park. After learning this we decided information like this should be updated on the site and put in a place that is very easy for a user to access.
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Through these interviews we were really able to get a qualitative feel for what the visitors who are coming to our hospitals need from our websites. Often times in the past our sites had been driven by what was important to marketing so it was great to have the interviews to show them how we can improve things for the people who use our sites.
Whiteboard activity
I hosted a whiteboarding session with some of my co-workers where we listened to the interviews and grouped all of the common themes from the interviews to help create the new user-centric IA.
BREAKING DOWN THE PROCESS
For this project I used many research methods to acquire data and to help formulate our strategy.
For this project we used:
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Tree tests
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Card sorts
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First click tests
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User interviews
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Competitive analysis
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More information on how each was used can be found below.
RESEARCH METHODS
We took the information from the current site IA and reorganized it and add information we felt was missing to create a new site IA. We then tree tested it to see if it was user friendly and based on those results we tweeked the IA where there were issues and tested again and got very positive feedback about the new sitemap.
Tree Test
User interviews
The user interviews I conducted were one of the most informative pieces of research through the whole process. I interviewed a total of 10 people. Ranging from hospital visitors, patients, front desk employees and administration to find out what was most important to to all of these groups so I could create a site that would meet most of their needs.
Card Sort
We had many terms that we had to include in our sitemap and a lot of the terms could fit in many different areas especially within the "Patient & visitor information" section. We used the card sort to gain user insite on where they thought the terms made sense and used their feedback to create our groupings on the "Patient & visitor information" hub page.
Competitive Analysis
I also thought it was important to look at what our competition was doing. It gave me a great idea of what other places were doing right and also what they were doing wrong. By looking at what other in our industry are doing I was able to make sure that I met and exceeded industry standards and provide a much more user-centric experience.
First Click Test
After we created the groupings for the hub page, we wanted to test the hub page design to make sure that it functioned well for the users visiting the site. We had users go through a series of tasks on that pages to see if they were able to navigate the the correct area on the page. We overall had a very positive response from users, which showed us the page was very user friendly.
RESULTS
Three months after implementation of the new IA we saw a 33% increase in the flow of traffic to the hospital website
Overall this research project was successful. It showed our business stakeholders the importance of involving our end users though the whole design process. When we listen to our end users we ultimately make products that work for them.
LESSONS LEARNED
This project was a very large undertaking for one person, but it really helped me put my research skill to the test.
Having all the quantitative and qualitative data really helped sell the idea to the hospital leadership and to the hospital marketing directors. It was really beneficial to be able to create our user-centric IA and site templates and also have buy in from all parties.
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One thing I would have done differently is advocated for additional resources to work on the projects so we could have covered more ground with the research
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