Chris O'Brien Lifehouse Cancer Hospital
A UX Case study on helping people with cancer get the information they need
Our Client
The Chris O’Brien Lifehouse is a not for profit cancer treatment hospital in Sydney.
The Problem
The website’s information architecture made it difficult for users to find the information they needed for their treatment.
After much analysis the following problem statement was made:
Assisting recently diagnosed patients to find the relevant information from the website.
It was useful to start white boarding the problem, based on user stories
Approach
As this project was Agile and we had a two sprint cycle, the following approach was taken:
discover > ideate > prototype > test
• Analysed the website’s information architecture
• Conducted primary research (through guerilla interviews, user interviews, contextual inquiry, stakeholder interviews)
• Created affinity mappings and turned emerging insights into story cards
• Crafted a customer journey map based on persona and research findings
• Ideated, sketched wireframes and crafted hi-fi interactive prototype in Adobe XD
• Validated the new design through user testing.
Kicking off our Agile sprint in style with Rach and me
Research
We managed to get hold of some existing NPS Patient feedback data to work on.
I made sure to also look at Google Analytics data to understand user’s navigation behaviour on the site. Through this we found that user’s who stay on for more than two interactions are more likely to be using some of the main pages. Shorter visits are more likely to use more specific or deeper pages.
On the common pages, a user will normally move through and between the following pages:
Home, Team, Departments, Contact us, and Find a doctor.
We also conducted interviews with stakeholders and user’s that were given to us by the hospital, as well as our own guerilla interviews with people in our network who had experienced cancer.
Based on the results we identified the following pain points:
- patients can’t find the information they need on the website
- patients are overwhelmed by the information provided in the navigation
- carers aren’t directly supported
- the higher level navigation does not work well on mobile
I put together the user journey map using the insights gathered from the research and data from the interviews creating our persona’s journey in detail
The existing patient section menu is overwhelming.
The Affinity mapping exercise allowed us to find the patterns within the large amount of data we had gathered.
Outcome
Based on the user feedback we redesigned the information architecture for the site which not only streamlined their navigation but greatly enhanced the online experience for patients
Some of these wireframes are presented below:
A closer look of the patients landing page, before and after.
We presented our findings, customer journey maps and delivered our interactive prototypes to the client
Feedback
“I really like that you’ve done some stuff we can do easily BUT I also love these bigger changes and want to move toward them.”
“Huge thanks to the team for the fabulous work you presented this morning. We’re excited to get these moving. You’ve provided clarity and helped us see really easy ways to make big improvements.”
Conclusion
The outcome was generally very positive. The client loved what we did and took away all the ideas presented.
Some thoughts on what to do if we were to do a similar project all over again. The patient journey took longer than expected. If the staff had been engaged sooner, our research findings would have been more efficiently obtained. Another idea would be to try to ideate new web solutions with a Developer and the Chris O’Brien team – perhaps using 6 up 1 up. That would allow us to iterate faster and give the client a better understanding of the work of UXers and what they expected from us.