SEATTLE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL REDESIGN
Challenge
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Combine regional sites into one
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Promote safety and wellness programs
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Make it easy for providers to create and post content
Solution
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Create few but flexible templates
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Cross-promote content via taxonomy
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Streamline content uploading and promotion
Outcome
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Patient ratings improved
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Class signups increased
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Video viewing increased
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Providers posted almost 2X content
Understand content ecosystem and user priorities
I was the UX Lead working with Odopod. We did user research and content analysis to determine the best ways to serve patient families & serve providers, staff, and the digital team. We optimized common user paths and created semi-flexible templates for all main content. This image is one of >10 sections of the new website.
How we worked with SCH was as important as the solutions we designed
We needed to get input and buy-in from many different stakeholders at SCH. So we started with low-fidelity "Parti" diagrams (first image) to solidify the general content and prioritization within pages before doing higher fidelity wireframes then comps (second and third images).
This enabled us to evaluate more approaches early on and enabled us to get most templates mostly locked down before we got to comps.
Parti Diagram (low fidelity)
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Wireframe (medium fidelity)
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Comp (high fidelity)
Meet the needs of the three stakeholder groups
The three groups were:
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Digital staff of SCH (desired flexible automated templates to manage lots of content and features)
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Patient families (Main tasks were a) Getting to appts b) Making appts c) Getting safety & wellness info d) finding out about a medical condition
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Healthcare providers (Make it easier for the doctors, nurses, researchers to post content to the site)
Improvements and results
1) The templates we created gave a common structure and brand experience to the site while allowing for enough variation to serve the specific needs of different departments.
2) SCH wanted providers to create more content, which patients tended to value highly. Providers were very busy with their primary roles, obviously. So the goal was not to get providers who didn't want to produce content to suddenly write a blog. The goal was to make it much easier for those who were inclined to create content to do so.
"Overall, Odopod has created a beautiful, functional, and flexible website. This is due in part to their balanced mix of process, creativity, and willingness to dive deep to understand what drives Seattle Children's"
Stephen Halsey
Manager, Web Services, Seattle Children's Hospital
And then to better promote that content. We streamlined the internal formatting and uploading process for articles and videos. We created more prominent places on the site for that content to be promoted, which incentivized those who wanted to produce content.
3) We dug deeper to understand the needs of patient families who primarily spoke languages other than English. SCH was considering translating their entire website in several key languages. We wanted to see if there was a better, less costly, solution.
What we found was that there were key tools and content pages patient families needed or wanted to interact with. But for general info they would ask a family member more proficient in English (teen child, aunt, cousin, even a friend or neighbor) to look it up.
The biggest need was being able to filter doctors by languages spoken. Prior to the redesign the languages a provider spoke would be listed on their bio page. But you'd have to click through individual bio pages to find out what those were. We added a languages spoken filter to the main "Find a doctor" page. That way the patient families could shortcut just to providers with whom they may be more comfortable. (SCH provides translators but many patient families preferred to find a provider who spoke their native language, if possible.)