Hey, Where’d All Those Users Come From?
Written August 22nd, 2007 by Michael GowanWe recently added a patient card feature to our site, and the results have been positive – and unexpected.
Our patient card feature works like many of yours: friends and family can enter text that is printed on a nice card design and is hand delivered to patients in Duke University Hospital. Our Volunteer Services staff handles the printing and delivery of the cards.
We added the form to our Patients and Visitors section of DukeHealth.org. It appears as an option in the flyout of the global left navigation.
We launched on a Monday with no fanfare. And after that, the deluge. Immediately, we started seeing an average of 30 cards submitted everyday (I should have read this forum post more closely before we launched this). Volunteer Services is going through two ink cartridges a day printing the cards.
And frankly, we’re very surprised by the interest it has generated. Our search logs never indicated a great desire for this feature; our user interviews never discovered it. We’d had some feedback through our Contact Us form, but nothing to suggest this kind of volume. We have not promoted the feature at all.
The most interesting part to me is how people are getting to the form. About 60 percent of our site traffic comes from search engines, with Google being the largest source by far. But almost no one has reached our Send a Card feature through a search engine.
Digging into our metrics, I’ve got this picture of how a user finds the Send a Card page.
- Search for “duke hospital” on a search engine
- Come to DukeHealth.org’s “Patient and Visitor” section
- Don’t see what he or she wants, browse the left navigation
- See and get interested in “Send a Card” feature
- Go through the process and submits a card
Then tell a bunch of friends and family to do the same (We know this because often a single patient will get a slew of cards)
I’m trying to grasp the lessons to be learned from this. My initial take is:
- Search logs can’t tell you everything that’s missing from your site
- People still browse
- Users can still surprise me
Based on what I’ve laid out, what would be your conclusions?
August 22nd, 2007 at 7:16 am
What a great story, and some interesting lessons learned. We used to offer that feature, but had to drop it because staff at most of our hospitals were unable (or unwilling) to support it. We’ve since brought it back for one of our hospitals, which makes it hard to find. Thus, our numbers don’t match yours.
But we talked about browsing vs. searching in another thread and I firmly believe that while search has it’s place, it is by no means the only or even the dominant way people find their way.
And users will always surprise you. Always.
Neal
August 22nd, 2007 at 8:15 am
One thing I think your situation is touching on is that we often ignore the group of users called “family and friends.” We might do a lot of testing for those looking for health information, current and potential patients, and search engine optimization to draw people to our site, but it seems we, in general, do little in terms of seeing how a family member or friend (regardless of proximity to the hospital, be it local, regional, national, international, etc) uses our sites.
Then question, then, becomes: is this important?
In one sense, it is because it’s a service not to the family or friend, but to the patient. Those greeting cards put smiles on their faces and contributes in part to their health and motivation. So there’s an obvious benefit to something as small as a patient greeting card service.
But in another sense, it might not be important because it commands little ROI. It might be possible that a family member or friend might come to the site to send a card, but does that contribute to the reputation of the hospital? And further, could that lead to a referral? Perhaps this would depend on the diagnosis/treatment of the patient.
As an example, let’s say your family member has cancer. You come to the Web site, send a patient greeting card, and because you want to learn more about this type of cancer you browse around on the site and get the information. This creates reputability for your organization. But what are the chances that you will also come down with a cancer that makes you consider going to the same health care organization? That’s debatable.
But in general I think it’s a great service to your patients. But I do wonder if usability by family and friends would be important enough to consider in terms of ROI.
Thoughts?
August 22nd, 2007 at 9:07 am
I think this brings up an interesting point, that is what we think people do vs. what they actually do. And most of the time people end up doing the opposite of what we think they do. How people end up finding this service, should not be a concern, even if 60% of traffic is from search engines. You have to keep in mind, how many users would actually go to Google and search for “duke health send an ecard”? Most likely not a lot.
For a service like this, people who do use it are those who are out of state or can’t make it to the hospital. And when they discover this service, they are going to tell all of their friends and family about this service. And there’s nothing wrong with word of mouth marketing. And its not uncommon for one person to get a ton of email daily. We are currently running a pilot program at one of our facilities and one patient, gets on average 2-3 emails a day, from out of state family and friends.
The take away from this is: 1) Never underestimate the power of word of mouth marketing 2) Users will almost always do the opposite of what we think they will do.
In the long run a service like this helps the patient feel special and helps with their recovery.
Rob
August 22nd, 2007 at 12:40 pm
My first thought is that Volunteer Services needs a better printer…
Ed
August 22nd, 2007 at 2:44 pm
@Ed: Hahahahaha. Great input as usual Ed. Can always count on you for some intelligent, quality responses
September 12th, 2007 at 9:42 pm
Bravo! What I love about this is that it proves that sometimes we do things because it’s the right thing to do. Well wishes to patients, without focus groups, log analysis, card sorting, benchmarking etc.
A win-win for all of us.
Don’t you all sometimes just want to say, “We need to do this because it’s the right thing to do” whatever the issue or application may be?
September 14th, 2007 at 11:04 am
I think the ROI on these types of services will be seen over time. Services such as ecards and patient websites increase patient satisfaction and generate word-of-mouth advertising which is much more credible than a tv, radio or billboard ad. Services like these are also good for the health of the patients. Better attitudes equals happy people and results in healthier people.