Our client was relaunching a brand website for their kidney disease treatment. They were aware of usability issues with their current site, and analytics showed low levels of visitor engagement.
My role was to educate the team on how user research could address KPIs and promote engagement. I ran ideation workshops and led the research activities including writing the discussion guide, moderating usability tests, and creating the output that inspired iteration on our original design.
To address the site's high bounce rate, I proposed usability testing the brand's current site to identify barriers users had finding information important to them. However, the client indicated that significant content changes coming in the site update would make the test findings irrelevant.
Despite wanting to uncover pain points on the current site before moving to ideation, the fervor for change was not to be denied! Rather than stifle momentum, I organized a workshop to let the ideas flow and extract what was really on our client's mind.
Seeing that the client was already simmering with ideas to solve their bounce rate problem, I organized a workshop to jump start the project, getting everyone involved and all the ideas visualized to discuss. I organized and helped run a two hour workshop that allowed the client and our internal specializations to pour out all the thinking.
The framework of the workshop was as follows:
Lots of ideas surfaced for solving the high bounce rate, like end of page call to actions and shorter hero images that exposed page content.
Miro workshop aftermath
But a key topic in the workshop was how the site needed to address two major segments: patients that had not filled a script yet, and those who had and needed support. In our workshop we ideated on a site structure intended to address the information needs of these users. Our thinking was that structuring the site with sections labelled, "Considering BRAND," "Starting BRAND" and "Staying on BRAND" would facilitate users finding the information they needed and push down that bounce rate.
A "Considering Treamtent" section would address patients who were not on script, and "Starting Treatment" and "Staying on Treatment" sections would address those who filled their script
Would this structure make sense to patients? And how can the navigation and user interface promote exploration? In the client's words, "what can we do to make them click to the next page?"
Research subject:
Site navigation and exploration.
Research statement:
We want to evaluate our proposed site structure and navigation to learn if users can intuitively find content relevant to them so that they can rely on our site as an important part of their kidney disease journey.
Learning goals:
Our client was doing the development in house and required a lot of lead time, and there was an entire campaign being develeoped that would have to be integrated into the site imagery and copy. We had to shoe-horn research into the timeline.
My initial thought was to do a card sort because it would give us an impression of how patients conceptualize information regarding their disease state. It also didn't require any prototyping that would eat into the timeline.
But, our clients were intrigued by the prospect of watching users interact with all the user interface ideas that we explored during our workshop. So we aligned on usability testing of a prototype.
The client had access to patients from their marketing activities. The participant pool reflected two key segments: people on medication that needed support, and people that were not on the medication but were holding off.
We fit the research into a 4 week timeline. There was a lot of time needed to integrate the campaign which was based on a messaging strategy, and the client's dev team required extra build time.
View the full Discussion Guide
We ran 12 sessions: 6 with patients considering treatment and 6 with patients already on treatment. Each session was 60 minutes. Half of the testing was with desktop computers and the other half was with mobile phones. All interviews were done over Zoom.
A few sample questions:
Usability testing was done remotely with Zoom
Our output was split into two main documents: a topline report in a Word document that was handed off almost immediately after all the testing concluded, and a presentation of findings that was a 30 slide Powerpoint with video clips, presented to the client a week later in an hour and a half long readout.
The topline had our high level observations and immediate recommendations:
Our topline report went to the client immediately after testing as Word document, providing straightforward learnings and immediate actions we could take. A week later we provided a presentation of findings which included participant quotes and clips to create empathy in our clients, with descriptions of complex motivations that needed ideation.
The presentation of findings unpacked the points in the topline, providing some of the how and why behind it:
A slide from the presentation of findings. Getting to the homepage was an important part of navigating.
After our report we snapped back into ideation mode, workshopping new approaches to the parts of the site where we had key findings and insights:
A critical shift in thinking was that representing user segements in the navigation did not help participants find the information they needed. Participants were in pursuit of specific things — side effects, how the medication works, "the positives and the negatives" — and navigation labels that identified with which stage of the journey users were on did not help them find these things.
Coming out of an ideation workshop about how to redesign our patient stories section, I created some wireframes to communicate our content structure for these sections, and from there the product team moved into applying look and feel and incorporating the campaign.
Participants had different feelings about videos. Some were thrilled to be able to watch something as opposed to reading, while others saw videos as secondary to the text and indicated they might watch them after reading, or might not.
A lesson on our end was that we should have emphasized to the client how important it was that they attend the interviews, or at least watch the recordings afterward. The impact of hearing the participants wasn't felt broadly enough.
In regards to the testing, we could have made the tasks for participants already on treatment more relevant to them to get a more genuine read on how they felt about our content and what they were looking for.
Emphasizing or playing up the user interviews to the client may have made them more compelled to attend more of interviews and better fostered empathy, which would have made alignment on our design proposals smoother.
I sensed a future research subject emerged from the testing. I would really like to understand the importance of community in patients with rare diseases in a separate research project. We heard a bit about the kidney disease community from participants during testing, but didn't have the bandwidth in the hour-long sessions to probe.
Why do patients of rare diseases look to community? The answers we had for ourselves seemed too simple: that it's a rare disease and people want to find others like them. Why do they want to find others like them? What role does the community play in their disease state journey and how does it affect their decision making about treatment and disease state management? There were lots of opportunities to ask questions about things we thought we already knew the answers to, just not enough time.
