HealthPartners Public

Goals

The overall site was re-architected to both communicate the breadth of HealthPartners offerings, but get easier access to key user tasks.  The landing page and main sections of the site needed to be redesigned to be task oriented with clear calls-to-action. I was to also act as “acting project manager” to lead the consultation with the cross department working group to facilitate requirements gathering in addition to leading normal design and experience activities such as wireframing and design sessions.  Overall site structure and information architecture needed also to be addressed in the work group settings.

Discovery

It was clear that I needed to evangelize the importance of user experience to senior leadership and steering committees, so that the working group could negotiate on behalf of their individual business silos. I prepared prototypes for user testing and refined design to optimize the experience.  This was used to help communicate the need to simplify and remove user frustration, which made the task of prioritizing across business silos a little easier.

Implementation

The challenges during implementation were many.  HealthPartners originally had a website that was persona based, but users had to self-identify, to proceed.  This was the largest confusion point.  It was one of the major reasons for the redesign, but it meant that quite a lot of information needed to be generated that was never needed before.  It was also important to identify, classify and rank key tasks, so that we knew we were addressing user concerns.  It was also important that the underserved business units had exposure as previously the public website had little overall communication about the breadth of HealthPartners family of organizations.  Implementation also uncovered issues with the need for a better optimized structure for search.

The overarching content strategy was to move to a task based model that focused on the common tasks performed regardless of audience type.  This was accomplished by adding large task buttons for the most common tasks as well as deep links to specific authenticated tasks in the logon area.  This has helped raise awareness of the features as well as giving users direct access to common authenticated tasks.

The addition of news stories feeding fresh content to the landing page and back-end work to improve search engine optimization helped with it’s google ranking for key tasks and terms.

Outcome

We measured success through the use of our overall brand affinity scores.  The redesign of our online purchase method for individual health insurance also showed a marked improvement on completed sales.