Data showed us that the number of patients logging into My Doctor Online when coming from a health reminder email was hovering around 60%. This was problematic for a variety of reasons. The main one being that the patients weren’t seeing the information that they needed in order to stay on top of their health care.
This led to the request for a redesign. I was the lead visual designer for this project and collaborated with a user researcher. We took a look at the entire flow and analyzed areas for improvement. We wondered how we could increase the number of people who are completing sign on and following through on their health reminder.
Discovery and research
To learn more about what was holding back our patients from completing their task, we held some usability tests on our current design. From these tests we learned a few key points.
- Patients weren’t confident that the e-mails they were receiving were from their Kaiser Permanente doctor since there was no Kaiser Permanente related branding on the emails.
- Certain mail clients were flagging the e-mails as being possibly spam which increased the level of suspicion within our users.
- We had no consistent e-mail template so there was a variety of emails being sent out that had different visual treatment.
From this research we discovered the real problem and thus were able to focus our design on addressing these pain points.
Defining the problem
Patients didn’t trust the e-mails they were receiving because they weren’t sure they were from their Kaiser Permanente doctor. Thus they treated the e-mail as spam and were not acting accordingly. How could we instill this trust into our patients and thus increase the conversion rates of these emails?
Redesigning for improvement
I created user flows of the current experience. This was helpful because it also highlighted another potential pain point: our current sign-on page also had no Kaiser Permanente branding so my intuition told me that there could be a drop-off once people came from the e-mail. The current page also had a very different look and feel from the emails they were receiving so one might not feel confident they were on the right website. Once I realized this, I took the lead on redesigning the sign-on page in order to maintain consistency throughout the flow.
Creating a standardized e-mail template
I started by taking a look at the variety of emails we sent out and analyzed the content that was in them. The content had to be very generic and vague in nature in order to protect private health information. Working around this limitation, we came up with standardized text for all the various care paths. In addition to the content, we updated the design to incorporate the Kaiser Permanente logo as well as the My Doctor Online logo. We felt that by creating this association between My Doctor Online and the well-known logo mark of Kaiser Permanente, we could close the trust gap that people were experiencing.
Designing the sign on page
The initial ask was to redesign only the Health Reminders emails that were being sent but after looking at the user flow, I foresaw the issue of the sign on page not being consistent with the email. Using the email design as the basis, I redesigned the sign on to create a consistent look and feel across the flow.
Visually, the old sign on page had too much going on and not a clear focus of what to do on the page. There were an abundance of links on the left side navigation that I removed in the redesign. This limited the risk of people abandoning the current task flow. In an effort to stay consistent with the e-mail, I included the Kaiser Permanente logo to instill trust that our patients are in the right place.
Delivering the product
After the enhanced designs were created, we tracked the metrics for this task flow over the next 3 months. We saw a drastic increase from 60% to over 90% in the rate of people signing in and completing the required care path. We were honestly quite surprised at how well the redesign had worked and the stakeholders were happy to know that our patients were back on the right track.
