Usability. And Then Some.
Written November 14th, 2007 by Pamela LandisWhile so many of the WebiScopers were off in Las Vegas basking in the sun, I was holed up with our team and members of usability firm watching patients and area residents navigate our web site and a demo site and provide general feedback on things they are looking for from us online.
I don’t want to say it was depressing but it was exhausting. And illuminating. It was kind of like reading Dr. Seuss, “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”
So much of what we take for granted on a web site, our audience does not understand. The findings cut across socio-economic lines. One caveat is that we tested only with people 40-65 which generally is the sweet spot for our online marketing. (Of the 200,000 MyHealth users we have at HenryFord.com, a full 63 percent are in that boomer bracket.)
While they were less sophisticated at finding content, they definitely were more patient at it. Patients seemed content to click around until they found what they wanted. If they felt they were getting somewhere clicking, they were content to click away and tended to underreport the amount of time it took to find the information they wanted. (My takeaway on this is that when someone says, “All content should be three clicks off the front page,” tell them research here and reported elsewhere seems to confirm that users are happy to click away if they feel they are making progress.)
One of the biggest learning lessons was around Find A Doctor, arguably one of the most used functions on our site and I bet most hospital sites. People don’t get how it operates. They think they have to know a Last Name of a physician. They think they have to fill in every box.
So then when we showed them a demo of a site, that allowed users to search by Disease/Condition OR Specialty, AND/OR Location OR Zip, OR Last name (and last name was way at the bottom), they still didn’t get it.
Users thought they had to fill in the disease name and the specialty name and the location and the zip and the name.
Takeaway here – Design will definitely inform function. We’re going to have to come up with a more intuitive Find A Doctor because people did not read directions. Of all the people we tested, only one read directions. The rest just skimmed.
And no one scrolls on functional pages like Find A Doctor, but there is scrolling on content pages where you are discussing a disease or condition. These people spend at least 11 hours a week and some reported spending more than 20 hours a week online. Only two used the scroll bar.
Oh, and this group generally distrusts video – unless it’s related to patient education. Otherwise, they get you are trying to sell them something. They certainly aren’t interested in Videos of CEOs.
If you’ve never done behind the glass, record every keystroke, scenario-based testing, I recommend it. It’s an eye-opening experience. The information people want, the manner in which they will access it and the expectations they have for your site might surprise you.
We’re going to take what we’ve learned in these usability tests and the heuristic analysis we’ve done of the site and completely overhaul it.
One obstacle will be whether I will be convincing enough for my internal clients to radically change our site.
November 14th, 2007 at 8:31 am
Between this entry, and Neal Linkon’s session on usability in Vegas, you’ve summed up a “best practices” in regards to assembling an intuitive “find a doc” application. Pam, for not attending the conference, parts of your findings echoed Neal’s discussion to the letter practically, so it’s great to see it independently reinforced here.
I’m also happy to see more cheering for usability testing, especially in “Big Brother is watching” style. *I’m* all for it; convincing the check signers is the tough part. But I’ll add this to my arsenal.
Thanks for your insights … I think I’ll go take another look @ our physician referral app now …
November 14th, 2007 at 10:47 pm
Hopefully, when we get the recommendations from the testing firm, I can share some nice screen shots or videos of the users navigating a site.
We also showed them three design comps. Two that our web firm did were liked by all the users. One that an ad agency did was universally panned.
It lead off with a splash page (no kidding) and then went to all this video. One guy said, “Oh my God, I hate this.” I nearly spit out my coffee.
Then we asked a user who said they would use our site to find a doctor to attempt that task. So he found it where it says, Find, then Doctors. He saw it,paused, said, “this looks good.” Then skipped that and went to Learn – Health Encyclopedia….
At this point, I was in the fetal position in the corner.
November 15th, 2007 at 10:08 am
Wow, some great points Pamela. I kind of suspected the video thing, but didn’t realize it would come across quite so suspiciously.
And I definitely agree with you when you say that design informs function – Neal had the same thing to say about the ‘find a doctor’ application. Apparently, people think they are expected to fill out every single box. Things like this aren’t thought of enough when creating forms (or other online web-apps for that matter).
Thanks for the great insight into what user testing can really be like, and how eye opening it is. Great post!
November 15th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
I wish I had time for it every year. It’s that useful and entertaining. And I’m really glad Pam’s experience mirrored ours. For whatever it is worth, Pam, we saw the same thing on our Find a Doc form. Several users completed the whole thing like they were filling out a purchase form on Amazon!
November 16th, 2007 at 1:33 pm
I was amazed to learn the same thing about online forms when we launched our new intranet. Our old site was built in Dreamweaver and didn’t have any way to search areas like policies, news or classes. You simply had to scroll through pages of information to find what you needed. When we introduced modules with search boxes people complained about what they perceived as a need to choose a particular category. They didn’t have any idea that you could just leave the fields empty and click the submit button to get the whole list. The written instructions explaining the process didn’t help much.
November 16th, 2007 at 5:27 pm
Thanks for the write up Pamela. I did not attend Neal’s session, though it would have been a good one to see.
We have hired a usability firm to run tests on one of our current projects (a massive realignment of one of our primary sections on our main website). But instead of bringing our participants in at the end of the design to test, we have brought them in at the beginning to really try and facilitate a user centered design approach. This is the first time we have done this kind of testing, in this fashion, with a professional usability firm
The first two phases were really centered around the development of content template wireframes. We used this testing to find out what exactly people wanted to see on the page and used those findings as a basis for creating the content template.
So our project has three phases, with each phase being tested accordingly:
Phase 1: We tested our initial wireframes; made adjustments – created wireframes with more fully realized layout based on content preferences
Phase 2: We tested these revised wireframes, made adjustments; content is now being developed.
Phase 3: We will test a built-out staging site with pages designed and content developed per results of first 2 phases. Hopefully we will not make too many adjustments but I am sure we will make a few.
It is not cheap, but the experience so far has been invaluable; so much so that I have budgeted for them to do ongoing testing for our more expansive projects. And one can argue that it can help save money in the long run by taking the guesswork out of the process.
November 16th, 2007 at 11:58 pm
So then does anyone have an answer on a perfect Find A Doctor application? Generally, we found people plowed through ours and on our “future” one, they plowed through a little more quickly. But it was painful to watch.
November 19th, 2007 at 3:58 pm
We made subtle changes to ours by making the primary items more obvious and the rest somewhat less so, and found big improvements. Take a look and you’ll see what I mean. We didn’t want to lose some of the search options that many people found valuable, but we also wanted to make the form appear less like every field was required. We’re happy with our results so far, but I can’t say that it’s perfect, by any means.