Southern Illinois Healthcare Preference Test
About
We were approached by Southern Illinois Healthcare to see if we could do a perform a preference test to discover why potential patients were choosing to take their business to their competitor, Heartland Regional Healthcare. Their website had not been updated in several years, and they wanted to see what changes could be made to sway patient opinion. They were particularly concerned about drawing more patients into their orthopedic care facilities.
1.0 Expert Evaluation
We began by doing a general expert evaluations of both the SIH and Heartland sites. We took a look at the navigation, home pages, doctor's pages, and health care categories. We then examined each site from the perspective of being a potential patient looking for an orthopedic surgeon.
Based on our findings, we decided to create a research plan to see what the patients thought. We wanted to see if the problems we found would be consistant with what the average user would find, and so we decided to do some preference testing.
2.0 User Testing
I created a research plan to find out why patients are choosing Heartland over SIH. We began by defining our test audience. Because SIH was mostly concerned with drawing people to their orthopedic services, we decided that the test demographic should match the typical demographic for orthopedic surgery, specifically for hip replacements. We limited test participants to those between the ages of 50 and 75, both male and female, with no income restrictions. We decided to test 8 people by giving them a series of tasks to accomplish on the site. These tasks included finding a doctor they felt comfortable with, and learning about the process of hip replacement surgery. Half of the users saw the SIH site first, and the other half saw the Hearland site first, to prevent user bias. Testing was conducted remotely using Validately and responses were recorded and analyzed.
This testing revealed some key differences in audience sentiment: 5 of the 8 users said they would have their surgery done at Heartland over SIH. We distilled these differences down into four key themes.
For each of these key points, we pulled relevent audio and video clips from the user tests to illustrate our claims. We found that users were very influenced by the design of the Heartland site, liked how easy the content was to find, and liked seeing the "30 Min or Less" ER pledge on the front page of the site. Users who did prefer the SIH site did so because they liked the content of the site. However, these users did still struggle to find the content they were looking for.
We presented these finding to the leadership at SIH, along with a set of recommended actions. These findings were key in helping to land the SIH account. The redesign began in March 2018.