New opportunity and challenge: Create a place for patients to sign up for on-demand telehealth visits addressing specific health needs.

The timinG

In early 2020 as the COVID-19 virus spread throughout the world and across the U.S., it became increasingly apparent that not only was telehealth urgently needed as an alternative way of delivering health care to slow the virus’ spread, but it would also become a primary way for patients to schedule doctor’s visits of all types well into the future.

Around this time in March, I had discussions with product managers whom I worked closely with as well as with company leadership to advocate for creating a new telehealth/virtual visit feature, which was not only relevant, but had the potential to be life-saving. It was a rare opportunity to help serve a very real and practical societal need with innovative technology.

Project scope

The original concept of this new Healthgrades feature was to create a “Virtual Clinic” as an intermediary site between prospective patients and partnering websites, which would host the telehealth visits and handle payments. Our goal was to present users with enough relevant information about specialties/treatments available as well as price differences and estimated wait times amongst the variety of partner options in order for users to make educated choices before starting a virtual visit.

The biggest challenge in solving this UX problem was creating mocks for the developers to build - determining what information to display to users - while having no idea which of the following data points might be provided or consistently available from each partnering vendor:

• Pricing: Do partners only provide flat, one-time payments, or do they accept insurance plans like traditional offices?

• Specialty areas: Which medical specialties will be available to patients and what treatments do they typically offer? How do we present this info to users in laymen’s terms?

• Location: Must patients be physically located in the state in which they reside to start a virtual visit?

• Availability: How many providers are readily available at any given time, and what is the average wait time for patients to start a visit?

• Hours: Are providers open for business 24/7 or only at certain hours?

These questions were just a starting point to consider before creating a smooth, seamless virtual experience that would meet both user and partnering client expectations. I took a stab at guessing the likely answers to these questions, designing mocks which could be quickly implemented once my company’s sales teams got telehealth contracts to be signed by partnering clients.

User testing: I set up a clickable prototype in Figma to test a user flow in which a potential visitor to Healthgrades’ telehealth clinic enters the website after exploring Google search results. I then created an unmoderated remote usability test on UserTesting.com to get user feedback on the search flow and designs. The testing found that most potential users were familiar with the concept of virtual or telehealth doctor’s visits and found the designs to be fairly straightforward and easy to navigate.

Some key themes to emerge from user testing were that determining the cost of a visit and whether their insurance would be accepted were highly important, and if there are many search results, having a way to sort or filter them would be ideal.

Assessing user feedback: After launching an unmoderated usability test on 10 users, I watched the recordings and took notes and clips of key insights. I shared out a few of these clips with my cross-functional team of developers and product managers also working on this feature (using the Slack integration on UserTesting.com).

Applying insights, adding UX features: As Healthgrades hopes to add an increasing number of partnering clients with added variety and complexity, I implemented some user feedback to give users the ability to sort search results by various criteria like cost or specialty, using a dropdown menu. This iteration will hopefully improve usability and will be added in a future sprint.

UI upgrade and copy tweaks: In an effort to improve the visual appeal and consistency of the designs, I coordinated with Healthgrades’ branding team of graphic designers to create a set of iconography for the specialty cards. My goal was to reduce cognitive load for users in identifying medical specialty areas. I also clarified some of the written content once we got more information from our partnering clients hosting the telehealth visits.

Going live: After contracts were signed and there were two partnering clients ready to go live, our development team deployed our first release of the feature. We went live to production with the Telehealth Resource Center in October 2020 and have already facilitated thousands of telehealth visits.

The company’s legal department determined that “resource center” was a more accurate label than “virtual clinic” so as not to suggest that Healthgrades itself is hosting appointments.

When the Resource Center launched, I got more design feedback from internal stakeholders. This prompted me to set up a design workshop session with my boss, an experienced UX designer, so that we could revisit the designs and revamp them for increased visual appeal as well as improved usability. The timing of this workshop also coincided with a company-wide update to our corporate color palette, allowing me the opportunity to infuse new colors into the design mocks as well.

Copy updates, restructured layout: I got input from Healthgrades’ editorial team to revise written content on the Telehealth landing page and rethink the layout of the page. I wanted to add more hierarchy to make the page quickly scannable and add treatment details to the specialty cards, providing users with more information to focus on the specialty that would best meet their health needs.

Data mapping: While updating designs, I met with one of our company’s data scientists to evaluate our range of treatments and specialties to ensure the accuracy of medical terminology. I worked with him and my team’s product manager to revise our list of treatment areas verifying that terminology and grouping of treatments are both medically accurate and user friendly, simple enough for users to understand.

New imagery: I again reached out to the branding team to get updated graphics and sleeker imagery to accompany the newer designs - the teal circles on the right mock above show intended placement of new and improved images.

What’s next?

As I continue to iterate and refine mocks for phase 2.0 of the Telehealth Resource Center, I’ll conduct more usability testing to validate or disqualify any changes for future implementation. While initial partner contracts were only signed for an experimental trial period through December 2020, the immediate success of this project has ensured that telehealth at Healthgrades will continue into the next year and beyond.

In addition to user research, I met weekly with product managers and a data analytics team to follow tracking and conversion related to all aspects of the resource center and determine areas for improvement. The data and user feedback will continue to guide the direction of the Resource Center, with more links to resources to be added as well.

While the future ahead is uncertain as ever navigating uncharted territory with a global pandemic, I am proud of taking advantage of an opportunity to quickly adapt and create a digital resource addressing real and immediate health care needs. Patients can meet safely with providers from the comfort of their homes to get diagnoses, prescriptions, and questions answered using tools that my team and I created.

This project represents the power of technology to innovate and truly transform the way that human beings interact with the world and solve real problems.