SuperCare Health
7 Weeks
UX Researcher
Heuristic Evaluation
Competitor Analysis
Google Analytics
Accessibility Evaluation
Technology Audit
Stakeholder Interviews
User Surveys
Personas
Sitemap
User Flows
User Stories
Project Manager
UX Researcher
Graphic Designer
Developer
SuperCare Health is a well-known west-coast provider of DME solutions, specializing in (but not exclusively selling items for) respiratory therapy.
The SuperCare Health team believed their website to be outdated and difficult to use. It did not grow with the business, and many pages were simply tacked on, which bloated the information architecture. Users were going straight to the contact us page to get the phone number to call in, rather than trying to solve problems themselves, resulting in around 60,000 calls per month.
How might we provide recommendations to SuperCare Health that help ease the burden on the phone system and improve the overall user experience?
1) Understand why users were calling in to the phone system.
2) Ease the burden on the phone system.
3) Evaluate the website and determine where we could make improvements.
4) Provide recommendations for other areas of the SuperCare Health business that could be improved.
Leaning on a number of research strategies, we put together a comprehensive UX report that provided concrete recommendations and action items that gave SuperCare Health the roadmap to improving their site.
To understand what we were working with, we first had to take a deep dive into evaluating the SuperCare Health brand as things stood. This gave us a baseline to compare against when providing our recommendations.
Utilizing Jakob Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics, we wanted to understand where things currently stood. We found a number of issues that ranged from CTA consistency to problems with form error messages. This also gave us a chance to get more intimately familiar with the site for later stakeholder interviews.
SuperCare Health had a lot of buttons that varied wildly in their designs.
After understanding the UX issues that plagued our client's site, we took a look at the competitors to see how they were solving for specific problems. For example, it was here that we found some ideas on how to improve the Support page, namely in the way of adding additional resource types for patients to comb through.
The Apria site has plenty of resources for users to look through if they need help.
We wanted to understand where users were going and where they were spending their time. At this point, we already knew that the contact page was a frequent visit of users, but we also learned that many were going to the Locations page as well. This gave use additional avenues to explore.
Because SuperCare is in the health industry, they needed to make sure they were at least AA compliant. With the assistance of WebAIM's WAVE tool, we ran a check on the existing SuperCare site to see where they weren't meeting AA standards. While the tool has some degree of automation, it still requires a human check for many of the items it flags.
The SuperCare site had a number of accessibility issues that prevented it from being even single A compliant.
Working with a developer, we investigated what improvements could be made in the backend on WordPress. We discovered that many plugins were either not updated to the latest version or were not even being utilized, while the PHP server was still running on an unsupported version. All of these contributed to slowdowns we saw during our performance checks, as well as security holes.
Many of the plugins that SuperCare used were not up to date and presented security risks.
Interviewing stakeholders is and has always been a crucial part of our research strategy. It helps give us insights into areas of the business that might not be apparent on first glance, or even within the data.
We spoke with 16 different stakeholders across each department within SuperCare to understand the problems that they were facing. When compiling our reports, we don't want to limit ourselves to just the website—we aim to understand the full scope of the business. This helps us provide accurate recommendations that can affect other off-site things, such as NPS scores for delivery drivers or print marketing materials.
Part of our interview script for the SuperCare Health data team.
Due to the nature of HIPAA, we were unable to speak directly with SuperCare users. However, this didn't stop us from doing our due diligence. We conducted user surveys on Usability Hub to speak with people who closely matched the personas for the site. While not ideal, we still did gain valuable insight by asking questions like
These are the main forms of communication that SuperCare Health was considering using.
At this point, we had a pretty good idea of what was plaguing SuperCare. It was time for us to begin creating the steps toward a new and improved website.
When mapping out the existing sitemap, we discovered that it was pretty large with many pages that didn't need to exist on their own, and this is something that was backed up during our stakeholder interviews. We were able to condense the sitemap, combining multiple pages, while streamlining the users journey into more organized Patients and Providers sections.
LEFT: The existing SuperCare sitemap. RIGHT: Our proposed sitemap.
One of the things we heard time and time again was that many of the phone calls revolved around order status. The existing user flows that we mapped had this and other patient-centric items like Bill Pay as separate items. We proposed combining all of these into a patient portal that housed all of their pertinent information in one location.
Because we went beyond just redesigning the site by proposing a patient portal, we also created a comprehensive set of user stories that helped define specific requirements through acceptance criteria. The client also requested user stories for the marketing part of the site, which isn't something we typically do, but we created those as well.
We created some user stories to help shape the patient portal.
The crux of out UX strategy report was to provide recommendations to our client on how they could improve their site. In addition to the improved sitemap and user flows above, we also created personas and specific action items for SuperCare to enact.
We knew right off the bat that the broad users of the site were providers and patients, but our personas went one step further. For example, our patient personas were broken down into several types, including The Worried Parent, and the Inexperienced Patient. Each had their own distinct needs and user experiences when interacting with the brand.
The personas for SuperCare Health went deeper than just "Patients" and "Providers."
We provided SuperCare with 19 recommendations for improving their site, as well as some specific action items to tackle. Our recommendations were scored on Priority, Effort, and Impact scales (all from Low to High) that helped them prioritize what to do first. Some examples included:
Our supporting evidence for the recommendation "Improve the Information Architecture." Later slides include specific action items to achieve this.
It wasn't just enough to give this report to SuperCare. We wanted to walk them through our findings in detail as well as providing the rationale behind our recommendations. This consisted of a 2-hour long presentation of our UX report, with ample time for them to ask any questions.
The UX report was very well received, and the SuperCare team signed on to the full redesign project. They did decide to take the patient portal part in-house with their CIO leading the project, but our user stories still helped them understand exactly what they were building.
