Overview

Details

Project
Responsive Website Redesign

Role
UX Designer, Squarespace Developer

Methodologies
Heuristic Evaluation
Competitive Analysis
Traffic Analysis
Interviewing
Usability Testing
Figma Prototyping

Team
Liam Robb O’Hagan

Duration
6 weeks

My wife was trying to make an appointment on her Chiropractor’s website. There were two options on the navigation Appointment or Schedule. She chose Appointment which went to a form you fill in and submit. That would not work for someone who already had an acute pain in the neck.

Then she tried Schedule button which took her to new site where she could select an open time of her choosing. She thought that appointment must be for new patients.

“You need to UX this site” she declared as she walked out the door!

Optimal Health Chiropractic and Wellness was built by chiropractic website company, who offered a website, SEO, facebook and google ads service. Dr. Seth Pearl ended up with was a site that failed to generate new patient leads, did not appear on the google map list when I searched for “Chiropractors in Harrison, NY”, was broken and full of stale content and didn’t perform the basic function of streamlining patient appointment scheduling.

I contracted to build him a new site that would meet the needs of him and is patients that based on research and tested for usability.

How might we help patients better understand the range of services offered by Dr Pearl and afford them a way to book an appointment and fill out paperwork before they arrived at their appointment?

Research

Heuristic Evaluation

I performed a Heuristic Evaluation and determined what Dr. Seth Pearl ended up with was a site that had:

1.     An image obscuring the home and about menus on the homepage

2.     A broken navigation on the secondary pages

3.     Three hero images with the same discount of new patient’s promotion that clicked through to a page without any such promotion,

4.     Where information was detached from the headlines

a.     Contact Us block between two blocks on the practice specialties

b.     A Benefits of service section populated with the history of Chiropractise,

c.     Pregnancy and Wellness listed as symptoms

d.     A section on how to google chiropractors in Harrison, even though the user had already found the site of a chiropractor in Harrison.

And that was just on the homepage 

The Blog page was canned copy, and indistinguishable from the pages describing each symptom or ailment. The information architecture of the Section on aliments was convoluted

The webinar page had one piece of content from 3 years ago.

After Heuristic evaluation I discussed the site with Dr Pearl and asked him why he had a webinar and a blog? They offered it, he said and it seemed like a good idea.

I asked him if he had heard of the concept of a Destination Disappointment?

Did you have time to produce a webinar or write a blog? Would Social media marketing be a better use of your time?

The shoddy execution aside Dr Pearl had been sold an idea of what a Chiropractic Website should be. The primary user seemed to be the google search-engine algorithm

And even then the site didn’t come up trumps on google search.

The site didn’t deliver what Dr. Pearl wanted, let alone meet the needs of his patients.

 Stakeholder Interview

My Stakeholder interview with Dr Pearl and his office manager revealed this information that was not readily discernible on his home page. :

1. He is a certified nutritionalist

2. He is focused on wellness not just chiropractic care. Some how the wellness had been cut off his website logo

3. He treats newborn babies who have trouble latching on to the breat

4. He treats pregnant women

5. He Treats children with autism and ADHD

6. He had state of the art equipment to scan spines to ensure a proper diagnosis

7. He can perform electronic adjustments for those who are uneasy about having their necks cracked.

8. He had electronic medical records but still liked a paper copy of a patients intake forms because he liked to scribble notes during a consultation rather than type them.

None of what Dr Pearl wanted to communicate about his practice.

User Interviews

I interviewed 7 people about their views on chiropractic care and wellness, how they find, book and onboard with medical services in general and how they search for information if they have injuries or are suffering pain. Four of the interviewees were patients of Dr Pearl’s. The key findings and insights were:

I did an analysis of traffic to Dr Pearl’s Website over a 3-month period. This information was of limited value as:

1. Only 55% of visits were from New York State IP Addresses, meaning likely potential patients.

2. The current site navigation was broken during much of that period.

3. There was no information about how many people exited the site to go to the acuity scheduling service.

However the analytics supported the qualitative research in that

1. About Us was the most visited secondary page as people wanted to get a sense of the doctor.

2. Almost half of visits originated from Search (47%), and most of them were Google.
   

Only 8% of visitors originated from social media (primarily Facebook) and 43% were direct, either returning patients or people referred by them or new patients clicking on the link in the new-patient email.

128 People visited the Special Page, that was promoted on the homepage hero page, but offered no promotional deal. Even if that number hewed to the breakdown site visitors, that was around 70 potential patients, whose opening experience was not user friendly. This is not an insignificant number.

Persona and User Journey

Design

A New Feature Set

After presenting these findings, Dr Pearl, Kim his office Manager and I discussed the features we could add to the site and did a design studio focused on the homepage.

The features we decided to incorporate into the site were:

1. In order to break the common perception of what chiropractic care is, we need to highlight the range of conditions Dr Pearl can help with and the technology he uses;

   a. Develop a Hero Image that is both informational and graphically appealing.

   b. Include imagery of Dr Pearl using technology, get a quote about that.

   c. Be careful to avoid the terms treatment and cure, which is legal requirement.

   d. Reduce current site’s three-level deep one condition per page structure to a single symptoms and conditions page with brief descriptive overlays. This is designed to be quickly scannable, not a competitor to Web MD.
   

2. To Acknowledge the role of referrals in the selection of medical care, we decided to use video testimonials with break out quotes: People might not watch the videos, but their existence gives credibility to the testimonial, that a signature by “Jane D” can’t offer.
   

3. Make the appointment scheduling options stand out.
   

4. Include a sidebar that makes location & office hours always accessible.
   

5. Describe the New Patient on-boarding process as a 3-step flow emphasizing the options of scheduling an appointment, filling in paperwork and introducing the technology used in the initial consultation
   

6. Design an email footer that supports these functions and can be used to better interface with the website. 

High-Fidelity Designs

I wanted a final design that stood apart from the traditional medical website and reflected Dr. Pearl’s sense of fun. I achieved this by:

1. Taking the wispy figure from the logo as my inspiration I draw quick loading vector images to replace a large homepage Hero photo. This enabled me to visually indicate Dr. Pearl treats pregnant women, infants and children as well as the typical person we think of as a going to the chiropractor. Plus I was able to make the image interactive with pain spots and condition labels appearing when the user hovered over the image.
   

2. I wanted a websafe font to reduce page-load time, and settled on Candara, which is websafe, quirky and not ubiquitous.
   

3. Rather than flat colors I took tints of the blue from his logo and used them as background gradients to add some interest.
   

4. I applied corner radii and used floating circles to mirror the circle on his logo.
   

5. I used a spine outline to break up the squares that tend to form between sections on a design.
   

6. For the mobile version I removed the right-side bar to declutter the design and used a separate animation instead of the interactive Hero image, which would not have worked on an image of that size.