HealthEngine (AUS) in 2019, Web responsive search product results:
+10% absolute CTR
Australia’s #1 online healthcare destination.
HealthEngine focuses on patients and practitioners’ experience to make it easier for them to connect. Providing innovative solution to 3.5 million users per month to facilitate 26 million bookings with practitioners in different specialties.
Thanks to users feedback we received, we started to noticed people had created new behaviours and had new needs when it comes to finding their new healthcare providers.
The project objective
We needed to explore more in depth these opportunities and see how our main product, The Search, could evolve improve patients’ experience when they search for a new healthcare provider.
My product team - including Product Manager, growth manager, Marketing specialist, SEO specialist, SEM specialist, Service Designer (myself :)), Engineer Manager and Front and back end engineers - Kicked off the project aiming to revolutionise the way people approach the search of healthcare providers.
The outcome of this project is confidential, I will be sharing the process my team followed but I won’t be able to reveal any juicy information :)
The approach
The Research
The Solution
Detailed Design phase
The release approach
The results
The approach
We divided the project into three phases:
Phase 1: Research
We wanted to understand more how people search for new healthcare providers at the moment. Understand their needs at each step of their journey to identify new opportunities for us the to improve their experience.
Phase 2: Design Sprint
With the research in hand, we focused on defining the design solution using the well-known method Design Sprint 2.0. We wanted to have a validated solution to define the product roadmap.
Phase 3: Agile design
Product, Design, Growth and Eng worked together to bring into life our new Search concept to improve our patients experience.
The Research
What we wanted to learn
Identify patient personas to understand their needs along their journey.
Understand the patient journey while searching for new healthcare providers.
Understand patients expectations of their healthcare providers and what’s most important to them.
Understand the main pain points and frustrations that patients have searching for new healthcare providers.
Identify opportunities to improve how patients engage with HealthEngine during their research.
Methodology & Sample
We opted for a dual approach first qualitative, to understand the “why”, and then quantitative, to scale our findings.
For the qualitative approach, we interviewed 12 patients, existing HealthEngine users and non HealthEngine users, 6 male and 6 female, aged from 24 to 50 y.o
For the quantitative approach, we ran a survey and got 1791 complete respondents (+1027 partial answers) from existing users aged from 18 to 60 years old.
The Interviews
Our objective being to map out the patients journey and understand their needs and challenges at each steps, we created a hands on activity based on the generative research method. The more people gets hands on, the easier it is to get them to talk in depth about their feeling and emotions.
The activity consisted in using cards to make participants map their journey when they search for a new healthcare provider, and provide us with more information at each steps:
Step card: To write down the action performed
Information card: To write down what the information the person was looking for or would need at that step is
The Feeling cards: Emojis to be used to indicate how they are feeling at that step
The Suggestions cards: To indicate what could be done to improve their experience and propose suggestions if they felt like to.
Healthcare can sometime be a sensitive topic, so we needed to create a really comfortable atmosphere for our interviewee so they would be willing to share their thoughts with us.
User Journey and Personas
At the completion of the 12 interviews, we managed to define a general user journey with the list of different needs for each steps. After an analysis of all these needs, we identified 4 main ones which lead us to define 3 main personas, based on how much each of these four needs was expressed.
New opportunities and Ideas generation
We identified 4 main opportunities shared across our 3 personas, that represented our top priorities to optimise the experience of the majority of our users.
The time had come to share the learning from the research with the team and present these opportunities to start generating ideas.
Sharing the learning with the team was a crucial moment in the project as we needed our full team to empathise with our users and understand their needs and expectations. We needed to make sure the team was on the same page before we started working on the ideation phase. We built up stories to present the different personas, user journey and opportunities, to help out team members to relate with our learnings.
Once all the team was on the same page, we used a method called Mind map to generate ideas to answer to our 4 main opportunities. We realised 4 mind maps, one for each opportunity, to gather the more idea we could, based on the learnings we had from the qualitative research.
Data validation
Our last step in our research was scaling the findings we got through qualitative research with quantitative approach. We decided to run a survey to our existing users aiming to validate the findings on users needs and expectations and get a first validation on the ideas we generated from the Mind map.
Thanks to more 2000 answers, we managed to understand, at a bigger scale, the importance of these needs and challenges and validate the appetite for the early ideas we had.
With the level of understanding of our users, and the alignement across the team, we were ready to move to the Solution phase.
The Solution
As we all know, the pace in start up can be really fast. In our case, we dedicated a quarter to our research and we were hoping to get a first roadmap few weeks later, to inform the business when prioritising the work for the following quarter.
We choose to run a Design Sprint, following the new methodology proposed by AJ&Smart, Design Sprint 2.0.
We reviewed the structure a bit to accommodate with the team availability and got our 4 days scheduled 🙂 : Map, Sketch, Decide, Prototype, Test.
The team's level of commitment has never been that high. Being involved in the process from the beginning allowed the team to have a clear understanding of our users and enabled each of us to take informed decisions and get our creative juice going to the right direction during the Sprint.
We tested our prototype with 6 users, which helped us validate our concept and get great suggestions for improvement.
At the end of the sprint, we had:
A validated concept
A list of features to be designed
A long-term vision for our product
An aligned committed team to the project
This allowed us to plan our detailed design phase quite easily, building up a clear road map for our product and defining our design approach for each feature design.
Detailed Design
Our products team are multifunctional teams, working agile on a 2 weeks sprint basis.
We created a design cycle to work on each feature following our roadmap. The design cycle aimed to include the team in the design process and test our design to validate our decisions before it gets built. We worked on each feature following the cycle below:
Kick off: This meeting involved Eng, product manager, designers, growth specialists. The objective was to define the design principles to follow for the feature. For that we
Discussed the first concept designed
Reviewed the learnings from previous experiments and user testing
Reviewed technical requirements based on the technology we were using
Reviewed a benchmark of case study that each of us could present
Define the principles designers will have to follow while designing the feature.
Design Review: The designers present the first designs
User Test: Usability test, face to face or remote, to validate the experience.
Design Review: last design review before it was handed over to the Eng team.
Following this cycle helped us keep the whole team involved in the process and facilitate the Eng handover. By using Figma, we had lots of flexibility to share the designs and receive the feedback from the team. At that stage, another designer joined the team to support in the execution process.
The launch approach
The New Search project included the redesign of the full search experience from a design perspective and a technical perspective. Which meant a full rebuild of the product.
Guided by our growth mentality, we decided to release the new search experience progressively. Here are the steps and principles we followed:
Progressive release to a percentage of our user to minimise the risks
Release the new UI keeping the current experience.
Reach feature parity: build all the current features with the new technology
Ensure our metrics are increasing or maintained, and release to 100% of our user base.
Built up on that, adding the new features to reach the full potential of our new concept.
If you are one of the lucky users part of the first release you could already have the chance to experience the New Search on the HealthEngine website If that’s not the case, wait for it, something big is coming :)
Update 2022 - Released to all users. Check it out: www.healthengine.com.au
The results
The early results I am currently able to share are the following:
CTR increased by 10% absolute
With our first release, users are already able to identify better the healthcare providers of their interest and either start a booking or go to the provider profile.