Patient-focused provider search redesign for Providence St. Joseph Health
The Digital Innovation team at Providence St. Joseph Health (PSJH) was tasked with redesigning the the provider directory ("Find a Doctor") to increase ease of search, improve the site's SEO rankings, and increase online appointment booking. In three months we increased customer search success from 48% to 57% and grew online appointment scheduling by 42%. Additionally, these pages were the first pages to implement the new PSJH Digital Design System.
As Design Lead, I developed the UX roadmap and facilitated learning based on our two week sprint releases. My responsibilities included conducting user research, gaining stakeholder alignment, providing comps and redlines to engineering, and writing user stories with acceptance criteria.
“Ever since my doc retired, I haven’t bothered to find a new one because it’s way too hard.”
When Providence Ventures invested in Kyruus, PSJH gained access to a new technology delivering provider search and match, but was stuck on how to integrate it into their existing legacy systems.
The project stalled after initial research and brainstorming efforts, and I was brought onto the team to move it forward.
I began with a deep dive into the previous work. This gave me the opportunity to understand the positioning of this product as it stood, get to know the back end service we were using, and uncover any missing user insights that could guide our development.
I created three personas to align the team around the specific user flows we were solving for. Though there is some consistency in what is important when looking for care, patients weight each aspect differently when seeking primary care, specialty care, or searching on behalf of others.
Next, I developed maps that visualized the patient's frame of mind as they searched for care. This emotional journey mapping (top row of circles) allowed for the identification of the touchpoints that PSJH can effect or control (middle row of rectangles). This was then used to identify Find a Doctor opportunities (bottom circles). Please, click through to see all 3 journeys.
Once the opportunities were framed, the team expanded from myself and a PM to include two engineers and a TPM. As the engineers dug into the Kyruus technicals specs, I worked with the PM to develop wireframes that we tested with users in order to frame the future state of where we wanted to go.
The wireframes, user feedback, and input from the engineering team on the Kyruus api allowed me to develop a ux themes roadmap to guide the product development.
In order to continuously get feedback, the design team established monthly "Round Robin" user tests. They were structured so ten participants total (five in the morning, five in the afternoon) rotate through five "rooms" where they provide feedback on five different projects happening at PSJH
Over three months, I developed an understanding of how our users thought about finding providers (both primary care and specialists), A/B tested future concepts, got feedback on the live site, and was able to validate priority development features.
Expanding PSJH's provider search capabilities from name or specialties to include subspecialties, scope of practice terms, and symptoms allows those with lower health literacy rates to still find the right care for them.
Provider profile pages were redesigned so that information is grouped to aid in patient's decision making. What providers want to highlight (education, board certifications, publications) was not always what our patients used to choose a provider. The page was redesigned to put patient needs first, but to still highlight provider accomplishments.
Frequently patients are deciding between two or three similar providers. We found they were opening separate windows to compare them side by side. By creating a compare feature to do this in a single window was a quick win.
The first thing patients wanted to know when searching for a new provider is "who is close by?" Location focused view of the search results allows a user to navigate with a mental model they were already familiar with.
