Intake, Kickoff, and Planning

Onboarding to the LifeBridge Health Team

We conducted a kickoff and intake session with the LifeBridge Health team to get a better understanding of their priority goals for the website and any pain points they face in website content management. During this kickoff session, we identified the available data the team currently uses to make data-informed, insights-driven decisions for their web content, discussed current process from initial concept to live content, and explored the available features and functionality for use within their current content management system. To understand how the hospital's business goals translate throughout the different departments, we conducted 8 stakeholder interviews across various departments in the hospital, such as legal, medical leadership, department heads, and HR/Talent. Once the interviews were complete, we presented a summary of findings from the interviews grouped by theme. With the understanding of available decisionmaking data and current stakeholder initiatives, we built a research plan that best addresses key client hypotheses and assumptions, while maximizing the use of the available budget. Our research plan was proposed as an Agile UX research plan, with research conducted at multiple phases throughout the project, in order to build complementary findings, instead of standalone research outputs. We recommended starting with formative research to better understand the audience and the problem space through a mix of user interviews and a website survey instead of selecting one. In this initial survey, we collected data about why users come to the site, what affiliation they had with LifeBridge, and any demographic questions that might help us identify user groups. We also asked questions about their perception of the current experience to serve as a prior-state benchmark, although that data was of secondary importance during discovery.

Accomplishment: Through our UX Research Plan, we were able to broaden the scope of the initially proposed research to include heatmapping, conduct both interviews and surveys, and include multiple types of summative UX research activities for validation beyond usability testing of the wireframes; all within the same budget.

Understanding User Behavior Across the Digital Ecosystem

Coming out of intake with an approved research plan, we began conducting our planned research activities in an Agile fashion to Each member of the team was assigned ownership of tasks that aligned with their area of expertise and included in other discovery tasks as support personnel. We conducted the following UX activities as part of our discovery:

• User interviews
• User survey for benchmarking and initial feedback
• Comparator analysis of six sites (primarily healthcare with a few hospitality sites added in for additional inspiration)
• Heuristic analysis with two reviewers
• Analytics review of their total 2021 site usage data
• Performance analysis using Google PageSpeed Insights
• Representative content audit of 40 pages that contain all page types, components, and templates to be represented in the site redesign
• Current state sitemap to understand the size of the current site and scope of the archival needs
• Heatmapping and session replay review
• Brand immersion

Room for Improvement: In future iterations of an Agile UX Discovery, we'll present findings to stakeholders in a biweekly fashion to keep continued engagement throughout and build efficiencies that allow us to begin information architecture, design, and development phases sooner.

Presenting the Discovery Summary & Key Strategies

As we completed each of the research tasks listed above, we compiled a holistic list of high-level recommendations for the site redesign, used affinity diagramming to identify key themes and strategies, and prioritized by impact and effort to make each task easier to include in their future roadmap once initial website redesign is complete. Alongside each recommendation, we included the data that inspired it and any additional information that Our discovery summary presentation was shared with various stakeholder teams to get their buyin and collect additional information on their requirements and available data as we started sitemapping and wireframes.

Building a Consolidated System-Wide Website Hierarchy

To aid the LifeBridge Health team in updating their content as we go through the process of redesigning their website, we drafted documentation around how to implement a holistic content strategy around content structure, governance, and workflows, with special consideration for ongoing maintenance in preparation for re-platforming to a more flexible enterprise content management system. We created the following templates to get the team started on content gathering in parallel with the website redesign: Sitemap Framework We built a main sitemap that housed the entire range of hospital-system-wide content and prepared a reusable, scalable framework for each service line within to organize content in a consistent structure that fits within brand guidelines for style, voice, and tone. In preparation for a sitemapping workshop with the client team and better understand the current state of the site's content, we built a prior state sitemap of each set of folders we could identify and organized it to create an intuitive hierarchy as close to the current organization as we could. With this information, we noticed themes/patterns emerge around content organization for a large number of the service lines and locations that just kept basic content, while others ignored that structure entirely and presented their content in a flat structure with no hierarchy or intuitive groupings. Content Inventory & Briefs Using the list of pages identified during the site crawl, we created a document to facilitate auditing the website content and keep track of each page from initial ideation to publishing within the CMS. Each page should have an associated content brief, outlining the specific content for the page, the relevant tags and metadata, the page template, components needed, and any other information needed by the development team as they populate the content into the content management system. Component Library & Component Authoring Guide For each component we've designed, we created guidelines that educate the authoring team on the necessary info and content restrictions to ensure consistent standards are being applied across the website, regardless of the author. This allowed the LifeBridge marketing team to scale their team of content authors without sacrificing quality.

Planning for Design System: this site requires a design system due to its size and disparate ownership, so all of the work done to date is intended to get their team started on formalizing a design system as the site plans for migration to Drupal.

Validation through Usability Testing

Alongside the refresh of the website's visual design, we are working to understand how potential users might interact with the new site. During the kickoff of the usability testing strategy, we identified that the biggest underlying assumption in need of validation was the decision to merge multiple overlapping service lines into being more organized at the level of the health system. Our testing process will include multiple smaller tests targeted around various facets of the website that contain important content, and we will be running unmoderated tests in a mixed between-within subjects study design to collect data quickly while still digging into particular segments and how they'd use the site. Our usability testing strategy was built to cover each of the following goals, with associated testing types:

1. Navigation validation (tree testing)
2. Desktop layout and content testing (wireframe usability testing)
3. Mobile layout and content testing (wireframe usability testing)
4. Design testing (5-second, first-click, and A/B testing)