[ROLE]
Director of Design
Insights & Empowerment, BU
CHALLENGE
Our core application (a provider finder that plugs into a health plan's web portal) had continued to grow without a cohesive UX strategy for how we thought about search. The way we displayed results became unscalable, made continuous iteration nearly impossible (due to an inflexible and monolithic component structure), and limited our ability to deliver meaningful partner integrations.
GOALS
Increase the team's foundational knowledge of "search" as a product area.
Catalog core issues with the search experience and drum up internal momentum for dedicated capacity for improvement.
Deliver incremental improvements that centered around larger perspectives on scalable search paradigms.
ROLE
Led team of five product designers, UXR, and product data analyst through year long north star projects, which transitioned into different prioritized product improvements.
OUTCOMES
7970
Sources of feedback analyzed (220 usability study participants, 34 extended user interviews, and 7,716 member survey responses)
8
Shipped, data-driven, continuous improvement scopes (improved browse tiles [2 iterations], autosuggest [3 iterations], filters overhaul)
14 ↑
Lift in CSAT for members searching for a new specialist (Q2 - Q3 '24)
Shared research repository established; new bi-weekly CX-focused meeting, serving as main bridge between clients and Design
UNPACKING THE PROBLEM
The team completed a comprehensive heuristic analysis of the current search experience, conducted observational member research around task completion, and audited best-in-class search paradigms beyond healthcare. Similarly, we read textbooks to understand the foundations of how search works, notably Peter Morville’s Search Patterns and Greg Nudleman’s Designing Search.
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
Clearly surfacing “product categories” throughout the ‘find flow’ will allow users to self-select more relevant results.
The current search paradigm under-utilizes faceted search and buries filtering as a find method.
Members should be able to understand the relationship between the ‘Find Parameters’ and the results returned. These parameters must be clearly visible and manipulable to members.
Product needs to provide clear guidelines of intended system functionality and recommended taxonomies to guide client-custom configurations.
At a certain point, an all “browse” solution doesn’t scale.
Emerging from the qualitative and quantitative analysis of our existing search experience, coupled with synthesis of leading research on search paradigms, the team created multiple north star variations of how a member might find information on our site.
North star concepts allowed the team to gut-check broader search paradigms for overall usability, facility internal conversations with engineering partners around viability, and demonstrated to our clients a commitment to continuous evolution and improving CX metrics.
MOVING PAST THE NORTH STAR
Creating north star prototypes, capturing research synthesis, and infusing our recurring team meetings with discussion on the need for evolution, allowed Design to meet the the broader goals we'd set out to achieve:
Generated organizational alignment on a vision.
Are we (Design, Product, Engineering, Account Managers, Sales, etc.) all in agreement on the underlying issues with our search UX and agree that movement to a new paradigm is necessary? Can each team understand how all the pieces fit together into a larger user journey? Can we see the different benefits to different persona groups?
Told a story (the north star was in a narrative format).
How does our product fit into the nested journeys implicit in healthcare? How do different persona types interact? What are their goals and how are we supporting them?
Did not suggest a vision that was simply a redesign.
How can we fundamentally transform our user’s lives and provide value, while avoiding further stagnation of our core product?
