Leading the redesign of the behavioral and mental health site was a great opportunity to learn and research about the mental health space. Learn what our users thoughts on the subject are and find out what their expectations were for this resource.
Since this was a redesign of an existing site I was able to analyze the current traffic for the site. See how users are currently coming into the site, where they are going from the site and even the device they prefer to use on the site.
SEO data was also available for review. Seeing what types of topics users were searching for internally and what they typed to get to the page using google was very insightful.
User-testing was done to look at find-ability of the current site, trying to pinpoint potential bottle necks or drop off points that were potentially keeping users from getting to the site. It was determined that more entry points were needed, so a plan was developed to address that. Surveys were also sent out to help facilitate what types of topics or articles to include in the new site.
Personas, goals, user journey’s, each page had a purpose written out to help guide the design phase, design phases were created to introduce phased launches.
Goals: Educate users about behavioral health to give confidence in speaking up for themselves and talking to an expert. Reduce emergency room admissions, if doing so is not a risk to the person. Keep users within the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan website (the current site had a lot of external links).
A way we could help achieve our goal of educating users was to expanded the mental health guides, currently there was a specific guide for six different groups. Men, Women, Seniors, Parents, Caregivers and Members. Even though it was good to have such a wide range of demographic groups represented, the writing and layout of the guides were too generalized. This sentiment was backed from user testing which showed a lot of these groups didn’t feel like the content was relevant to them.
From here I had a lot of good data and a solid plan forward. I knew that crisis support was very important for our users, I knew that users wanted to be able to search for a therapist and that the guides were wanted but needed to be written to include specific content and articles for those demographic groups.
Looking at how other organizations in similar fields helped to get an idea of how they organized their information and what services they offered to the general public.
The mental health guides were going to play a much bigger role in the new redesign. I took screen shots of each guide and noticed similar patterns. This helped to guide the work for the future guides.
Having a template to model the guides felt important, it also helped to keep the work focused
while also giving flexibility to the different needs of the groups.
Work being done on the know the basics page. I like to point this out, but on the left we have the old page. The pink dots represent links that all go to the get support page. All the same destination, but why?
As work continued with the get support page, I decided to do user testing to get feedback. Specifically asking if they felt like anything was missing, what they would add, which section did they think was most important and to rate the site visually and on the quality of content. Then I would do a comparison test, comparing the old site to the potential new design. I went back making changes based on the feedback and repeated this until I felt satisfied with the design and feedback I was getting.
I needed to plan for the content and how a user would potential navigate through the site. Does it make sense, are they able to quickly find what they needed, and are we accounting for all the services that bcbsm offers?
Work continued with the other pages. Following a similar pattern of building, testing, making changes and testing again.
We finally went live, great to see all the hard work up and running in it’s intended environment.
Improvements with the overview page included a more compassionate tone and voice with the content, focused with providing encouraging action to getting users the support they need. With this more focused approach we were also able to reduce the overall length of the page, which scroll fatigue is a complaint we hear from users through out the business.
With the work of the get support page we see first and foremost information to get crisis support. Links, phone numbers encouragement to reach out. Next a section was added talking about BCBSM privacy policy. The reason for that was because we saw in our analytics that a large portion of our users were traveling from this page to the privacy page with the link down in the footer.
The know the basics page brings more of a focus to industry and the offerings of blue cross rather than specific conditions. We wanted to educate rather then leading them potentially down a rabbit hole of possibilities.
User testing helped to lead the organization and selection on the types and content of resources here for this page. Before users felt overwhelmed by the number of items on the page. So we reduced the number, changed the labels and consolidated some of the sections together.
