Unite Patient Portal
making content meaningful to promote user engagement and support business Performance
Unite’s mission is to collect anonymous medical data of ALS patients and share it with pharmaceutical companies and researchers to help accelerate the discovery of a cure. Through their site analytics, Unite realized that users were coming back to the portal once a month as intended, but only 40% were completing surveys and updating their electronic healthcare records.
We needed to understand why 60% of users were not engaging with the surveys and electronic healthcare content on Unite's portal and update the experience to encourage these actions.
In retrospect, I wish I had urged Unite to engage in user research, or run the user research myself. I could have interviewed current users and understood more about their experience with the app to uncover what could be impacting their engagement with the content. I believe we would have been able to uncover the root of what caused this behavior versus focusing on a solution that relied on our interpretation of the site data and previous conversations with their users.
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Giving back to committed consumers with unique rewards.
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Quantifying community impact from customers' purchases.
Promoting goal-setting to encourage intrinsic motivation.
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I was enthralled by the patients’ commitment to contribute to the ALS community and I saw an opportunity to connect that commitment with their actions in the portal.
I added the impact score at the bottom of the sticky navigation to allow users to easily reference their score without detracting from the rest of the navigation content.
At the start of each new session, I wanted users to quickly jump into the actions available to them to increase their score. Instead of having users learn and define what actions they could take now to impact their score, I wanted an experience that would quickly lead to rewards. I added a section to the Dashboard (aka: the portal's homepage) that would dynamically update to show the actions available, so all the user had to do to increase their score was click on the listed action and complete it.
I created a content page focused on answering the key questions about this experience, such as “What is the Impact Score?”, “How do I increase my impact score?”, “What do I get from increasing the impact score?”, etc. To make the content easy to digest, I used a combination of headers, paragraph text, and icons, which broke up the content into bite size-information.
I designed a pop-up that would show newly earned points following the completion of an action. I also saw an opportunity to use animation to connect the newly-earned “points” to the total Impact Score on the sticky nav. This aimed to visually create the connection between the action and the growth of the impact score.
After reviewing the sketch with the team, the engineers told me that the Dashboard was out of scope for this project. This meant I needed to find a new way to clearly show the user's progress on their Impact Score and guide them to available actions to improve their score. Given that we were targeting sign-in as one of our user flow focus areas, I saw an opportunity to create a pop-up at sign-in showing Impact Score progress using animation and listed hyperlinks to jump to available actions. I wanted to leverage animation to show how the Impact Score changed during the previous session in a way that was fun and promoted gamification.
I met with the team to share what I deemed the key questions the content page should answer and align on what the content should be. We focused on a simple overview of the Impact score, ways to increase it, how the Impact Score relates to charitable donations, and the impact to the experience if opting out of sharing data with researchers. I formatted the content using headers, images/icons, and paragraph text to simplify the flow of content and make it easier to digest.
The team did not have any major feedback for the pop-up showing the additional points earned after completing a key action on the portal. We refined the copy, images, and added a "Dismiss" CTA to allow the user to exit the pop-up.
I realized that the Impact score and the Charitable Donations milestones had to be thought as part of the same experience. The Impact Score was the game, and the Charitable Donations were the award – you could not have one without the other.
I weaved the donations experience into the existing Impact Score experience to make their connection intuitive. I added a milestone reminder within the Impact Score pop-up upon sign-in and a call-out when a donation opportunity is unlocked from surpassing a milestone. The Impact Score pop-up already showed users their progress and adding the layer of rewards here encouraged action by giving users a goal to strive for. I also leveraged the existing animation to show when milestones are surpassed and the monetary value now available to donate. To differentiate the donation experience from the Impact Score progress, I added a CTA to lead users to the donation process.
To clarify the nuances of the donation process, I created a content page that outlined the details of the process and hosted the donation submission experience. This allowed all the donation process to be hosted in one easy location. This page could be accessed from a CTA in the Impact Score section on the sticky navigation bar or from the Impact Score pop-up once a donation opportunity has been reached. I wanted the content page to provide detailed information about how donations are connected to Impact Score milestones, your available amount to donate, and your donation history.
I originally planned to use the Impact Score logo to show the monetary value available for donation to tie the two experiences together, but after mocking-up the design I realized it was too distracting. I instead opted for more subtle copy calling out the monetary value and clarifying what it can be used for.
To make the content easy to digest I used a combination of headers, paragraph text, and icons, which broke up the content into visually-interesting bite size information. I also chose to make the monetary value available to donate large to catch the user's attention and clarify this page hosts the donation process.
To encourage education and limit overwhelm, I set up the welcome tour screens with a header to introduce the function, a subtitle to summarize the key takeaway, a short paragraph to provide more context if desired, an icon or image to make the experience visually interesting, and a navigation panel to move through the content and track progress.
Additionally, I added a subtle highlight on the sticky navigation bar over the title of the section being discussed to help users understand where they could find engage with that content once independently interacting with the portal.
The wireframes didn't stray too far from the sketches, although I realized for the experience to be easy to scan, it needed to have all the content above the fold, which made fitting all the desired content in such a small area challenging. This forced me to really consider was content was essential for the user to know for each section at this point in the journey and only focus on that.
One key piece that I realized I missed afterwards was the addition of a "Skip" CTA to allow users to circumvent the Welcome Tour if they so wished. Not having that option would force them to go through all the slides, or repeatedly click "Next", and start their journey on the portal with a negative experience, which was not ideal.
In retrospect, I wish I had urged Unite to engage in user testing, or run the user testing myself, to show the experience at each fidelity levels with current users and understand what was working or not working about the design. Despite wanting to ensure the experience met the users’ needs through user testing, I respected the stakeholder's preference and urged them to keep a close eye on site metrics post-launch to determine areas to revise. I believe we would have been able to more accurately create an experience that engaged users in the way we were hoping for if we had run user testing at each step of the design process.
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