The Brief
A global medical publisher built a search engine that surfaces evidence-based content authored/published/owned by the company that had been in the market for over 10 years. The product has long been regarded as a “reference” tool because it primarily surfaces long-form content (10min+ read time, like books and full journal articles). “Reference users” like medical librarians and researchers are the main users, who value the breadth and depth of content served.
Incoming commercial research exposed an existing and growing user base of clinicians who struggled to find easily consumable digital content to support patients at the point of care (ePOC).
Our goal was to redesign the existing site experience to provide clinicians with clearer and more actionable ePOC content, without alienating our strong existing base of reference users.
A business case was created for a v1 launch of the redesigned experience. Updating the main homepage look and function was prioritized as a lower-effort/lower-risk/higher-impact update.
When my family asked what I do for a living during this time, I told them that I worked on “a product that is basically Google for clinicians”.
Project Logistics
Role: UX Lead
Timeline: ~2 months during the summer of 2020
Team: cross-functional leads from product, tech, content, informatics, and commercial; a UX researcher was consulted as needed
Skills required: strategy, lean UX, mid-high wireframing/prototyping, usability testing, stakeholder engagement, presentation
Tools used: custom design system, Sketch, InVision, Optimal Sort, Zeplin, Pendo, Mouseflow
Our Problem Statement
“The current homepage does not adequately highlight the availability of our existing POC content. Our users need easy access to content that will enable them to learn, think, and act quickly and confidently so that they can provide the best possible care to patients at the bedside.
An updated ePOC homepage will need to more clearly surface POC content (shorter, more synoptic content with 2-5min read time) to better meet the needs of our clinical user base, without alienating our loyal reference user base.”
Lean UX Approach
Our stakeholders emphasized the need to get to market quickly. A POC-only tool had recently been launched in French, German, and Brazilian markets, so we knew we could leverage existing customer feedback, analytics, and insights from the recent product release.
Given the existing research and the categorization of this work as lower-effort/lower-risk/higher-impact, we framed the homepage update as an experiment facilitated by a lean UX approach.
Empathy & Hypotheses
Defining product use cases based on user goals
Use cases and high-level user goals were identified by the marketing research team and socialized with the product squads. This insight informed the creation of task-based proto-personas we used in ideation workshops, as well as a basic information architecture we could apply to the clinical versus non-clinical content on the homepage.
User Goals
To find a quick answer in between or during patient consultations.
To develop or confirm my assessment and treatment plan for a patient.
To keep abreast of the latest developments in my field of specialty.
For learning purposes - my personal learning, preparing for exams.
For teaching purposes - teaching others, preparing lectures, presenting cases to colleagues.
For my own clinical research.
User Pain Points
Historically, the team struggled to get stakeholder buy-in for user experience research. While we understood that some key areas of the site were problematic, we didn’t always know “the why” behind the negative sentiment we heard.
I got creative to gather user feedback and pull out insights: I learned that the marketing insights team would pull survey results from an in-app questionnaire, generating ~100 unique responses/week to multiple-choice and open-form questions. I asked to be added to the report listserv and used the data to start affinity mapping by theme and feature. This resource provided us with a heat map of pain points and greater detail behind why different experiences are perceived as unsatisfactory.
I learned the homepage could benefit from:
An easier-to-use search mechanism - knowing that an additional deeper study would be needed to investigate search further.
Clearer content labels on browsable content - to help users understand what they’d be getting into and ensure more successful clicks.
A greater variety of POC content - to achieve our goal of catering to more clinical users.
More visual content and design elements - to add character and break up monotonous content.
Hypotheses
Based on the evidence we gathered, I led the cross-functional team to define our hypothesis statements for the homepage redesign. This activity later helped us to measure the success of our solution.
“Highlighting POC content types on the homepage will drive higher usage of POC content and tools.”
“Highlighting POC content types on the homepage will help all user types find POC content more quickly.”
“Harmonizing the homepage experience to recognize the organic pivot points between reference AND point-of-care activities in a clinician's day will help drive clinician usage while preserving loyal reference usage.”
“Giving the impression that we have created a lot more new content without the large spend of actually authoring new content.”
“Redesigning will support the goal of our platform becoming the go-to tool of choice for clinicians and nurses, resulting in new business, higher renewal rates, and revenue growth.”