Atlantic Health

A new patient-centric experience strategy

In collaboration with the Design and Content Strategy teams, I led Experience Strategy for the Atlantic Health digital transformation. By analyzing user behaviors via both quantitative and qualitative methods, we delivered a data-supported strategy that empowered Atlantic Health to launch their new site with confidence, even going so far as to reference our test results in their promotional materials.

Problem:

As part of Atlantic Health’s digital transformation, key components like the Homepage, Navigation, Locations, and Find A Doctor experience were pivotal to the whole effort’s success. The marketing team needed to have confidence that their investment would pay off, both for patients and for the health system as a business. The Experience Strategy team needed to ground our solutions in real data and patient perspectives.

Mobile mockup of Atlantic Health homepage showing a list of common action links in the hero

Evaluate User Analytics

Two key sources offered us visibility into the instinctual behaviors of our users: an onsite survey capturing the reason for visit, and search analytics. Top organic searches indicated the user’s intent, while the top-clicked pages from those searches indicated where they were entering the site. From this analysis, we determined the primary user needs were:

Get Urgent Care
Pay Medical Bill
Access Medical Records
Find A Doctor

Three megamenu samples showing a key CTA for each

Content Strategy & Prototype

In response to the data, we proposed an action-oriented strategy for our designs, pulling key calls to action to the beginning of the user journey instead of burying them behind scrolls or clicks. In partnership with Content Strategy, the Experience Strategy team helped to create content zones that would motivate users to take these key actions.

Further, we created multiple paths to the same content, so that users could find it no matter their mental model or where they entered the site. Deliberate redundancy became a key part of our strategy.

Inverted pyramid chart showing how iterations of testing narrowed from three prototypes to one

Iterative Usability Testing

Finally, we tested our prototype against several objectives:

Interrogate our action-oriented strategy.
Identify key differences in how mobile and desktop users respond to the design.
Identify factors that contribute to the user’s confidence in using the site.

In order to test the widest range of design concepts and identify the most successful, we used an iterative approach, starting with two designs, iterating and then narrowing to one design to test again.

4-quadrant matrix with completion on x-axis and confidence on y-axis

Insights & Analysis

For each task and then again for the full experience, we asked users to rate their confidence in using the site. We then compared that to their observed success in completing the tasks (Attitudinal vs Behavioral).

Cases of high completion and high confidence are ideal, whereas cases of low completion and high confidence are considered significant pain points to be addressed.

“I found everything about this site to be welcoming, I found it intuitive, and everything I clicked on brought me exactly where I needed.”

— Test Participant, Female, Age 60

Results

Testing demonstrated that our action-oriented strategy was a runaway success: it gave users multiple paths to reach their goals and extreme confidence in using the site. Many users mentioned how much they appreciated that they didn’t need to find "the only way" to get to the information they were seeking.

Overall sentiments were 94% positive, with the 3 top terms selected to describe the experience as:

Easy to use
Organized
Clean

The team was also able to gather insights on the usage behaviors of mobile vs desktop users, and Under-35 vs Over-55 users, ensuring that the entire experience could be optimized for diverse patient populations.