Market Research

To validate our hypothesis of market demand, we met with healthcare clients already using other Healthgrades products, several who expressed needing new enterprise websites. However, they could not pursue the need because of the high cost to build. Herein was the problem: newly-merged and growing health systems needed to re-build their sites on scalable, customizable platforms, but the market’s existing enterprise-level solutions were expensive, took very long to build, and sometimes promised more customizability than was actually delivered.

Our product team had already built and was maintaining a healthcare website builder “lite,” used by scores of clients for hundreds of small, specialty-focused websites. However, it lacked key features and architectural requirements for clients to use the tool as an enterprise-level solution. With the market demand established and growing, we spent a week workshopping ideas for how the existing product could be evolved to meet the need.

End Users

This audience included a wide array of existing patients, prospective patients, and family members (or decision-makers) who would interact with a health system. In addition, they were from many different types of cultural backgrounds, levels of technical savviness, and ages. In order to work within budgetary and timeframe constraints we leveraged aggregated analytics data across multiple “lite” sites to get an understanding of their actions and workflows. One of the key insights we learned was the ideal placement for primary actions, both on computer screens and on mobile devices. We also discovered how far most users were willing to scroll to find their desired action before abandoning the page or advancing forward. These plus other insights helped inform design decisions for the new product.

Content Managers

The second audience would be spending many hours managing content on these sites. I interviewed 8 people – six designers and two team managers – who were already in the role of creating and managing content for “lite” sites. The purpose of these interviews was to understand how well the existing product’s functionality, configurations and options supported their needs. We also wanted to hear if problems or gaps existed and their suggestions for how they could be improved.

Mapping Insights to Features

With a better idea of what was needed to be successful, I compiled insights that highlighted gaps, opportunities, and recommendations. For example, every participant interviewed repeatedly accessed the same site admin sections. My recommendation was to add shortcuts to save them multiple clicks. Another key insight was their frustration by the lack of control over colors. My recommendation was to expand the color controls to better support variations in health system brands. However, I also discovered that some existing functionality (a color wheel picker) was rarely used by some and never used by others. As a result, while we expanded the control of colors for better branding control, we also removed the color wheel tool which decreased scope for ongoing maintenance.

We looked at the various page layouts commonly used in the “lite” sites and audited other health care sites to understand additional layouts that would be needed. From this we built a flexible, responsive grid system into the product in which a user can choose the number of columns in a row and place content sections within that grid.

We built a customizable library of components – both small and large – including buttons, headings, multiple versions of cards, marquees, and many more, and all of them allowed specific properties to be customized with a client’s branding. Details like square versus rounded corners and full-width images versus constrained to a maximum width were all part of the customizations available so that a content manager had freedom to use their creativity. That freedom was balanced with the centralized branding controls including colors and typography so maintenance of the sites were scalable and fast.