Overview
Sound Family Medicine is a privately owned clinic in Eastern Pierce County. Lately visitors to the website are struggling to navigate the information and are calling the clinic for help. This is slowing down the staff and dissuading new patients from making appointments.
Role
User Research, Usability testing, Product Strategy and Management
Team
Tools
Google Survey, Adobe XD, Keynote, Voice Memos, Paper, Pencil, and lots of coffee
Duration
3 weeks
Sound Family Medicine (SFM) is the largest physician-owned practice located in East Pierce County. With 4 clinic locations, they offer physicians who specialize in prenatal, maternity, pediatric, and internal medicine with walk-in services available. For 35 years, they’ve served their community with open, honest, and compassionate care. Their success stems from the strong, lifelong connections built with patients and their physicians. Many patients who were born at the clinic are now planning their families with SFM.
Challenge
How can we make the Sound Family website a better tool for visitors to access the services and resources they need?
Defining Scope
My team was lucky enough to work with Stuart Gordon, the lead designer for Sound Family Medicine. In the initial meeting, he outlined his needs and we explored challenges of the website from a user perspective.
We uncovered two big constraints, time and patient confidentiality, HIPAA. Since my team was a third party, we could not utilize current patients for our research. HIPPA protects patients’ information, which includes their identity as a patient to the SFM clinics.
I took these insights from our meeting, broke the issues down, and prioritized the tasks into a brief that my team could accomplish and would benefit SFM as a business.
Goals of the Project
Invite New Patients
Organize Information
Simplify the Experience
Target Users
As the project manager and researcher, I focused the project on designing a better experience for “New Patient” users. The most successful designs are driven from direct user research. If I couldn’t communicate with current patients, then I would have to research potential patients.
This decision was also driven by the business needs of Sound Family Medicine. A welcoming and focused website for new patients will help increase the number of appointments and therefore revenue for the clinic.
Interviews
I conducted 5 user interviews with users who were the decision makers of their households and made household appointments.
After each interview I had the participants visit Sound Family’s current website and review it for me.
I needed to gather the paint points of the website straight from users in order to validate the problems our client had presented.
- Patients trust other patient’s experiences and reviews of doctors more than a star-rating.
- Patients use clinic websites to understand the values of the clinic and initially find if they can relate to those values.
- Patients have a hard time trusting doctors.
Primary Persona
From these insights I created a persona who embodied the user’s goals, needs, and pains. This persona, Kristen Smith, set the foundation for future decisions.
Our main goal was to create a trusting experience for users like Krista.
Krista Smith
Needs
- To build trust with her doctor.
- Online reviews of her doctor written by real, current patients.
Pains
- Taking time off work for appointments.
- Complicated websites that make her dig for answers.
What does the Onboarding workflow look like?
I created a survey for the employees. I chose this method because it would be the fastest way for me to collect responses from the all the employees across SFM’s four locations.
The employees at SFM are the experts when it comes to speaking with patients and onboarding new ones. I wanted to make sure that our redesign took their behavior and pain points into account as well.
The impact of my survey revealed the frustrating and confusing process for both employees and new patients to make an appointment.
Hypothesis
We believe that by removing convoluted vocabulary and simplifying the on-boarding process, we will achieve transparency and build trust faster with for new patients.
User Testing
Round 1
Quantitative:
- Only 1 user completed the second task in the estimated number of clicks, 2 went over and 1 did not complete the task.
- 15 clicks was the fewest number a user could do to complete both tasks. Our testing average was 17.5
- Time to complete both tasks 1 minute 20 seconds, the testers average time to complete both tasks was: 2 minutes and 6 seconds.
Qualitative:
- 100% of users did not like the stationary location bar, and mentioned that they would expect to see this information in the footer.
- 75% of users looked for a way to create an appointment on the provider’s page. (This may have been biased based on the set up of the tasks)
- 50% of the users do not like the word “send” for the appointment request button.
Round 2
Quantitative:
- The average number of clicks to complete the first task was 9.6. The most efficient number of clicks was 9.
- The fastest way to complete making an appointment was 3 (7 if you chose a provider). The average number of clicks was 4.2 for the second task.
- The average speed for completion was 63.4 seconds (we believed it to be 60 seconds) with the fastest time being 30 seconds.
- 75% of users hesitated when choosing a provider type.
Qualitative:
- 60% of users mentioned the provider’s page being crowded.
- ⅘ users mentioned that they call to make their appointments, but 50% of those users mentioned that they dislike phone calls and would rather do it online.
What Changes Were Made
- A new button to request an appointment put onto the providers’ individual page.
- Appointment requests will be brought up as a modal that can be accessed on many various pages.
- Location information put into the footer.
- Hero image and large button tiles swapped places to follow the “F” pattern of users’ eyesight.
Check in with Stakeholders
Before we moved on to the third iteration, I scheduled a meeting with Stuart Gordon from Sound Family Medicine. I wanted to address our current direction with the wireframes.
Together we created a homepage that will cater to all the users who visited the webpage.
Final Changes Made
- Creating goal and hierarchy for provider’s page
- Fixing appointment page so it doesn’t have the sign in/up fill in
- Make the appointments a pop-up
Once we had finished our last round of user testing, it was time to call the project finished. The feedback we received from our participants helped inform what further steps will advise our client to take.
Ultimately we drastically improved through the iterations, and I would call our design a success based on these quotes from our users:
Future Changes
- Change the wording of the final page of the appointment request
- Make appointment request wording more clear that the user will be called by receptionist
- Add a time preference for appointment
- Add a time preference for when you want to be called for scheduling
What Did I Learn?
This was my first time leading a design team and working with a client on a design. I am so thankful for the team that I worked with; I learned how to communicate my needs to my teammates and how to transfer my team’s needs to our client when necessary.
Juggling both roles of UX Researcher and Project Manager kept me in a lean design mentality. I learned what was absolutely necessary to get the project done.