Website design research for a non-physician healthcare provider
Client: My French Doula. The business provides birth and postpartum doula services in Orange County, CA
Client Ask:
1. Discover actionable insights on how to improve the online presence of the business
2. Identify opportunities to create passive income
Background:
The client felt uncomfortable sharing the website's content with current clientele because she did not think it added value to her business appearance.
She was very unhappy with the website's navigation and overall brand appearance.
She did not rely on the website to recruit new clients for the reasons mentioned above. It was regrettable because the educational content held much value for her target audience.
Design Research Process
Phase 1: Stakeholder Engagement | Kickoff
Met with the stakeholder and talked about her business in terms of brand identity, what goals she had for the business, and what target clients she was looking to appeal to. Customer discovery questions
Findings:
values and beliefs of stakeholders: inclusivity, experience, evidence, science-based information, pro-choice, advocacy
what target user groups the client wanted to reach: liberal, pro choices, from all cultures, regardless of gender, and sexual orientation
Lesson learned: I used technical terms while the client was not familiar with them. In the future, I’ll make sure I’ll match language to the stakeholders’ reality.
Phase 2: Recruit & Interview Participants
I recruited and interviewed 5 users to gather in-depth information about
their needs and challenges in the past during pregnancy, labor, and postpartum
first impressions of the website and offered services.
Phase 3: Qualitative Data Analysis
Using whiteboarding tools like Miro has been helpful in transcribing interviews and clustering themes with affinity mapping. This method allowed the creation of meaningful cluster observations and insights from the research.
Observations were individual notes, color-coded, indicating the source of the observation.
Five theme clusters were formed: logo, services, navigation, content, and gaining trust.
Challenge: First, I focused on categorizing the feedback based on the reaction type ( what users liked, what was confusing, and frustrating). This approach did not lead to generating actionable insights. Then, I worked on grouping observations into insights, then themes. I combined the theme clusters and the client’s asks to work towards generating recommendations.
Phase 4: Stakeholder Engagement: Insights Presentation
Impact and Learnings
How did stakeholders respond to the presentation?
The idea of cutting down cognitive overload was daunting to the stakeholders. They welcomed the idea of working with a UX Content Writer, so To help them out, I offered to connect them with one.
What are the next steps for this project?
I advanced this project to the next level and created an application design based on the issues I uncovered during my design research.
What would I do differently?
After the stakeholder discovery interview, I would have continued with usability testing instead of in-depth user interviews. In that case, I could have come up with the synthesis in a shorter time.
