Zocdoc is a healthcare company that helps patients discover and book with doctors online.
Overview
Patient Home is the landing experience for any user who has just booked an appointment through Zocdoc’s web platform. This redesign project was part of a larger initiative to help first-time users better understand Zocdoc’s value and build a stronger, longer lasting relationship with the product.
Roles and responsibilities
I served as lead designer on this project as part of Zocdoc’s Engagement team. I partnered with PM, UXR, Data Science and Engineering teams to help see the project through from conception to implementation. Because the majority of this project happened during the pandemic, all research, analysis and design were conducted remotely.
Time and duration
6 months - MVP
The problem:
Prior research found that even while 91% of first-time users had a positive experience with Zocdoc, only 40% of first-time bookers booked a second appointment on the platform. Because a large percentage of first-time users originate their bookings with third party channels, the team had an assumption many of these users may not have a great understanding of what Zocdoc is or what it can do for their healthcare.
Patient Home sits at a critical moment in our user’s journey. It is Zocdoc’s first chance to capture the attention of these first-time, third-party bookers, and to hook them on for future engagement with the product. It was obvious that our current efforts in showing Zocdoc’s value were falling flat. Additionally, new features like onboarding required that Patient Home needed to do a better job at showcasing and utilizing Zocdoc’s value in this post-booking landing experience if we wanted to improve our key KPIs of engagement, return users and 30 day rebooking numbers.
Our numbers showed that 85% of users were not interacting with a key prompt on Patient Home they receive after their first booking. Furthermore, after closing the modal, 26% of users were bounced from the experience altogether.
How might we provide our first time users a more complete view of how Zocdoc can help them manage their health, thus building a stronger, more engaging relationship with the product?
The solution:
By thoughtfully integrating Zocdoc’s core values into the Patient Home experience, we shipped a more guided, value-driven Patient Home experience for both desktop and mobile web platforms. Not only were we able to showcase the value Zocdoc brings to patients in managing their health, users now had a better sense of how and why to use these features, and ultimately return back to Zocdoc in the future.
How we got there
The team settled on an overarching hypothesis that would serve as an umbrella for smaller, bite-sized opportunities within the Patient Home experience:
By providing our first-time bookers with a more complete view of how Zocdoc can help them manage their health, we believe they will better understand Zocdoc’s value and make them more likely to engage, return and book more appointments.
Align and analyze
First, the team needed to align on what set of values would best showcase Zocdoc’s ability to help patients manage their health. Utilizing learnings from prior foundational research, the team aligned on a group of value-driven themes that served as a framework for our approach:
Easily find and book a doctor
Effortlessly track your preventive care
Conveniently store your insurance information
Manage and prepare for your upcoming appointment
Because most of these features already existed in the current experience, the emerging challenge became clear as to how to make these values useful, practical and most of all, clear to new users who might not have any familiarity with the brand or platform. The way the current design stood, there was little explanation as to what these different sections were for, or how they could be beneficial to the user in the future.
I wrote out user needs and hypotheses to make sure I wasn’t losing sight of what the user needed and expected in this critical post-booking moment.
Competitive analysis
I looked around at different products to understand how others are currently solving for this similar space of a personalized profile/landing experience. I wanted to see how different platforms handled the IA of their signed-in landing experiences vs their users’ profiles and dashboards. I looked specifically at how other products solved for upcoming visits and orders, reminders, to-do items as well as search and discovery features.
Because Patient Home is a page of many different user needs and goals, it was critical to see how others were solving for this similar space of personalized information, performance and action.
Wireframe and iterate
Over the span of a sprint, I blocked and sketched a variety of concepts. The challenge here was exploring how far I could push the page, both visually and conceptually.
I iterated on various concepts. Because the page needed to feel like one cohesive story rather than a collection of features for our users, I looked into ways to combine and build value onto existing features. I looked at how we could build awareness, trust and guidance through the page’s structure at different moments in the user’s journey. I wanted this new experience tailored to the user’s needs right when they needed it. How could I make our value and product feel intertwined?
This stage was also critical in how far we pushed the current feature structure and scope. I met with engineering and product wanted a low-as-possible-cost solution, and as the designer, I naturally wanted to see how far I could explore. In the end, we struck a compromise: test a closer version to our IA against a “bigger bet” in transforming the page with a couple of users, and see what we learn.
Prototypes, usability and research
After meeting with engineering and product, I narrowed down the most promising (and technically feasible) directions. I wrote a research brief that outlined what we hoped to learn from each design, as well as scripts to accompany them. It was important to not only get a sense of the page’s usability, but how messaging and IA helped push the values we were trying to promote.
In the end there were three prototypes (including the page’s current design) to test in front of users. Going in, we had a number of open questions we hoped to uncover during the studies, including:
How much information do our users need at this moment?
What role does personalization play in driving engagement?
What types of information do they find most valuable?
Do elements like prompts and progress indicators encourage engagement and provide guidance? Do users understand it?
Key insights - research
We took away several key findings that both helped validate and re-chart a few of our assumptions.
Users want simplicity and clarity in this moment - not to be overwhelmed with information.
I had the assumption the old patient home felt simple, but also bare. What users really want is the information they need, but it needs to be essential and not distracting or stressful.
Users want to feel the information is personalized to them and delivered in a helpful, conversational way.
Users were attracted to moments of personalization and personable messaging. Little details like name and age as well as the messaging around their upcoming appointment made users feel as though this experience was tailored for them, adding a sense of trust.
Users want cues, “shortcuts” and overall convenience in grouping, adding and referencing their information
Users liked anytime we could bring information forward, like the third-party recommendations of the Well Guide. They also liked the moments we suggested specialties they could book. This affirmed our assumption that users wanted some type of guiding hand.
I notetook and transcribed each session and presented key relevant findings to the team.
The final designs
After synthesizing our findings, I looked closely at what was and what wasn’t working for users in our studies. Then, looking back to our core values, I applied the learnings to the features and began to slowly bring the page to life. Whether a slight change of messaging or an addition of a whole new feature set, every change on the page took a purposeful step in driving value to these new users.
Search and greeting
Theme: Easily find and book a doctor
First impressions matter, and the top of Patient Home felt suboptimal in setting up the rest of the page for success. We say “Let’s help you stay on top of your health” but don’t provide a clear way of doing so. Additionally, the swirling blue shape visually draws the eye straight up to the site’s navigation and away from the important meat of the page.
The greeting was updated to better communicate Zocdoc’s crowning value as a product. “Find, compare and book in-network doctors” is not only less ambiguous, it ties perfectly to the search bar below. To solve for technical constraints around any visual updates to the search bar itself, I added a solid updated brand blue to make it pop and give some focused breathing space.
Care team
Theme: Easily find and book a doctor
One of Zocdoc’s strongest capabilities is keeping track of all the doctors a user has booked with in one place. The old “My Doctors” feature poked at this ability, but fell short in helping users understand what other types of doctors they could find and add to their team.
Changing “My Doctors” to “Your Care team” + “Rebook and manage your doctors all in one place” pushed the idea that this section is meant to be a personal, curated list of care rather than just a log of past doctors seen. Adding additional dynamic speciality search cards drove our goal of suggesting to users what different types of care they could find on the site - from dentists to therapists.
Upcoming appointment card
Theme: Manage your upcoming appointments
The old upcoming appointment card had a lot of useful information that users respond well to. However, it was struggling to adapt to newly minted features, like the Pre Appointment and Insurance Guides. Additionally, the number of CTAs on the card distracted from the other items on the page.
The new upcoming appointment card is a prime example of solving for both our user and business needs. This moment was not only more guided and simplified for our users, it thoughtfully nudges them to explore other parts of the product.
The Well Guide
Theme: Effortlessly track your preventive care
Well Guide appointments are based on recommendations by third-party sources like the CDC and American Cancer Society. Its an incredibly valuable tool to help remind users of their due preventive and personalized care appointments.
While the current experience attempted at conveying a personalized experience, it lacked clarity into why these appointments were important, and why a user should track, let alone book them. Redundancy in points of entry combined with lack of guidance and color overload made this section more confusing than it needed to be.
By bringing forward these third-party recommendations, new users have more context around what these appointments are and why they should book them. Thoughtfully thinking about this feature’s permutations, like when an appointment is up to date, was equally important closing the loop on how this appointment and the doctor you chose to have it with create a symbiotic relationship on the platform.
Insurance
Theme: Conveniently store your insurance information
This feature did not have any visibility on the old Patient Home experience. As it stood, a user could only update or add their insurance information through search or deep in their settings in the top nav. Time and again we’ve found through research that finding doctors in-network is a key part in a patient’s decision-making process while getting care.
Introducing this feature on the new Patient Home screen not only highlighted the different types of insurances they can book with on Zocdoc, but also put users more in control in selecting and maintaining their plans.
Mobile Web
Because X% of our first time traffic comes from mobile web, it was important to think how the page would respond to a smaller screen size, and what information was essential to both experiences. Luckily I was able to craft the designs in a way that offers a seamless cross-platform experience.
SHOW LONG MOBILE WEB AND POINT TO IT LIKE A CHART?
Old
This feature did not have any visibility on the old Patient Home experience. As it stood, a user could only update or add their insurance information through search or deep in their settings in the top nav. Time and again we’ve found through research that finding doctors in-network is a key part in a patient’s decision-making process while getting care.
New
Introducing this feature on the new Patient Home screen not only highlighted the different types of insurances they can book with on Zocdoc, but also put users more in control in selecting and maintaining their plans.
Engineer and QA handoff
Working directly with engineers, I set up weekly check-ins to review their progress on the page’s different components, as well as answer any open usability/edge case questions. Of course, working remotely, my Slack “office” was always open in case these questions arose sporadically.
By keeping a regular design QA cadence, the team was able to address issues and concerns early and often.
Outcomes
Due to development and testing roadmaps, we launched the Desktop redesign first. Early results were promising, showing an increase in our key metric of 30 day bookings per user as well as increased click rates with “book again” . The new design also drove increase clicks on “book again”, Well Guide dates as well as
Next steps
While we weren’t able to add everything we tested with our users, we have plans to follow up on these additional features based on Zocdoc’s business strategy. Zocdoc’s new design system, Mezzanine, will further iterate and grow the visual language of Patient Home.