I worked on this project as the lead designer in a team with a developer, brand strategist, marketing specialist, and content specialist.
Our users needed a better way to navigate the website and more guidance on what immediate action they should take to accomplish tasks. We reviewed all of the pages, content, and task flows in the old navigation to reach a solution.
The solution implemented resulted in growth in conversion rates by 76% for online scheduling, simplified task flows, decreased site bounce rates by 8%, increased session length by 22%, increased the pages per session by 7%, and decreased task abandonment rates by about 12%.
The existing navigation had many issues of consistency and organization. During the research, we found users weren't sure what action to take. If users want to schedule with a doctor, there were many pathways that took many pages to arrive at the same destination.
The results show users jumped between Find a Doctor, Find a Location, New Patients, and Appointments before giving up. Some users called the number listed in the navigation, but many abandoned their tasks.
The navigation created a barrier to necessary care for so many existing and new patients. It made things so difficult, many users would go into offices to complete tasks available on the website.
When users arrive to the website their primary goal is to connect with their health care provider either through messaging in the patient portal or scheduling an appointment. The old navigation contained eight different items with a path to getting an appointment, most going to the same "Find A Doctor" page.
Users found it overwhelming to decide what path to take and the result of that was most using the search tool to find their doctor by name and call the office. This was frustrating for offices and users because it resulted in long hold times, unanswered calls, and ultimately missed appointments to the detriment of our users health.
The website and its available online scheduling options can help the practices better manage scheduling and minimize patient care gaps. With the organizations primary focus being Medicare patients, care gaps can be expensive for the organization and a threat to patient's lives, making it vital to remove barriers to scheduling care for users.
Once the needs were identified I began exploring solutions that were iterated on between multiple reviews with team members and various stakeholders to find the ideal solution.
I reviewed the top pages from the Google Analytics as well as the user flows for user insights, the team worked together to determine the items important to the users and business goals. We also identified pages that needed to be reviewed for duplicate information.
The content specialist and I reviewed the pages with redundant information, determined the most important ones and what an updated version of the content on those pages should be in order to reduce unnecessary menu options.
After multiple iterations of the navigation changes we took a final solution that we presented to outside team members for review in order to ensure groupings were clear and that it was clear what actions could be taken and how to do so.
The final review happened with stakeholders in order to get sign off on implementation and communicate all intended changes.