Building Many Roads to a Single Destination
Written January 2nd, 2008 by Michael GowanRinging in the new year with a resolution to improve the user experience of the Web, one site at a time …
One of the great challenges in building a Web site to meet the needs of many different types of users — for example, patients who could have any of a thousand or so potential needs — lies in the information architecture. Where do you put the key piece of information that a user is coming to your site for, when each user approaches the site differently?
Our philosophy is to avoid the issue as much as possible. How? We don’t make content available one way — we make it available many ways.
For example, we wanted DukeHealth.org, our patient Web site, to include information about insurance accepted at all the locations in our health system. We had learned in user interviews that insurance accepted is a huge factor in determining if they will see one of our doctors. As with all our projects, our goal was to implement the feature in a way that was useful to them and met our business needs.
It seemed like a simple thing that many organizations already have on their Web sites. I tapped into the expertise of this group and got a great list of examples. The most common way to present this information was a static list of plans accepted with disclaimer text about checking with plan for details. With the help of our managed care team, that seemed feasible. We plan to implement that in our Patient & Visitor section in the next few weeks.
But we wanted to take it one step further. Since the insurance is tied to the location, we thought it would be most useful to have that information of each of our location pages. So we plan to add a new link to the right column of every location page. Now, whether you think of insurance first or a location first, you can get to the same information: what insurance is accepted at a location.
By offering users multiple ways to access the same information, we hope to catch all potential cases. Don’t make users think like we do; let them access the information they want in the way that makes the most sense to them.
Thinking like users requires some creative thinking. Personas are one way to accomplish this — come up with different user types and write up descriptions that detail their demographics and main motivations. Then role play — how would persona #3 try to get information about insurance accepted? What about persona #1? Can we accommodate both methods?
We’ve used this strategy throughout DukeHealth.org. The hardest thing is not duplicating information, but making it available in multiple locations through links.
Have any of you tried this approach? What worked and what didn’t?
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:11 am
That is a tried and true approach. Ask any 10 people how they found the same piece of content, and you are likely to get 11 different answers. Amazing to me, though, is how many in the organization question when we offer more than one path to the same content. “Waste of valuable real estate,” they claim. I think they couldn’t be more wrong.
January 4th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Can’t agree more with the “persona” method. Especially when it comes to explaining the rationale behind any content organization decision made for the web. By assigning a persona, you are ‘humanizing’ the visitor - who is essentially nameless and faceless to the institution - and creating something almost tangible for those on the inside of the institution to latch onto. Give a persona a name, a face, and a story to go along with the reason they’re visiting your site - and all the sudden the room is full of great ideas.
As we’re re-designing our public site, we’ve just storyboarded an entire family of personas to match all the primary service lines we want to reach with the phase one roll out. They include a young couple, recently relocated (husband/father is an MI tech looking for work - touches up on the HR requirements; wife/mother wants to become a nurse - leads to our school of nursing) - they have a newborn/premie w/ issues (NICU). They have parents in the area w/ various mid-life issues (arthritis, high BP, etc), and they have elderly parents with their own issues (palliative care, etc), not to mention an in-law with a chemical dependency … I mean, it’s a soap opera. But each individual (persona) will give the various ’shareholders’ in our institution something to think about - and a legitimate touchstone from which to focus their creative input.
It’s actually pretty neat to watch - and that was just the quick brainstorming session we had to “design” our personas. I can’t wait to see what happens when we introduce them to the staff being interviewed …
December 12th, 2008 at 9:21 am
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