At Home Solutions, a home health care agency, needed its website to showcase the quality and professionalism of its care services.

THE ORIGINAL AHS website

We utilized the following tools in our initial analysis of the original website:

This preliminary research demonstrated that:

• Competitors keep users on the website by offering extra resources, like educational material if they are new to the concept of home healthcare services.

• A home health care agency’s services are typically organized by diagnosis, but the original AHS website lacked this expected pattern of organization.

• On the AHS website, the "Referral” form, through which users should be able to request services, was broken.

User Interviews

We conducted a total of 6 interviews: 5 with our target demographic (middle aged users who sought home health care services for a loved one) and 1 social worker (for her unique perspective).

Some of Our Immediate Takeaways:

• Users have to juggle caring for their loved one (usually a parent with progressing dementia), caring for their own children, and tending to their full-time jobs. They really need to obtain the assistance of a home caregiver!

• Users want to ensure that their loved one receives quality care from someone they can trust.

• Users want to know that their caregiver understands the unique needs of someone with their loved one’s condition (for example, the communication needs of someone with Alzheimer’s Dementia).

Affinity Mapping

What we found:

• Users need to feel confident that their caregiver will be trustworthy, reliable, and compassionate.

• Users rely mainly on word-of-mouth recommendations in finding a caregiver.

• Users rarely browse home health care agency websites, as they base their decision more on personal recommendations (see above point), but the website is still seen as important for knowing how to contact the agency for services.

• Searching for a caregiver can be an emotionally charged process — users would much rather speak to a human than fill out a form when requesting services.

Persona

User Journey Map

In summary, we needed a website that would be easy to use by an older user base (50s and older), and it would need to have a personal, human touch that conveys trustworthiness, compassion, and professionalism.

MOBILE FIRST DESIGN

AHS showed us their previous research, which demonstrated that a majority of users using their website were on their mobile devices. Using this information, and going by UX best practices, we approached the design with a mobile-first mentality: we first optimized the usability of the website for mobile devices, then translated the design to a desktop version.

DESIGN STUDIO

We independently sketched ideas for the website redesign, then regrouped to discuss what worked best in each of our sketches. We ultimately adopted a design that adopted the best of our ideas.

Some of the ideas we implemented into our design include:

• Testimonials page

  • Research indicates that users rely heavily on word-of-mouth recommendations in deciding on a home healthcare agency.

• Call Button

  • Users come to the page with a goal in mind: Requesting Services. They want to speak in real-time with a human being over the phone.

• Caregiver Screening page

  • Our interview with our stakeholders demonstrated that AHS has a whole screening process when hiring caregivers. AHS should highlight this process, as it emphasizes how serious AHS is about the quality and professionalism of the care they provide.

USABILITY TESTING

We conducted a total of 4 rounds of usability testing, with 4-5 users per round. Adjustments to our design were made based on feedback in order to improve the usability and intuitiveness of the website. The layout, navigation items, and nomenclature considerably evolved throughout testing.

Where do users expect to find testimonials?

Usability testing confirmed that users expect and want to read testimonials…if they could find them.

Early testing demonstrated that users had difficulty finding the Testimonials page. Our team had conducted card sorting/tree testing prior to creating our wireframes, but the results regarding Testimonials were ambiguous.

ROUND 1

Testimonials under About Us - users had a 100% error rate in finding Testimonials, either going to other categories like Services or not finding it altogether.

ROUND 2

We created a new category called “Why AHS?” but with no improvement in results.

ROUND 3

Ultimately, Testimonials found its own place in the menu, resulting in 100% completion rate and 0% error rate.

WHERE IS THE MOST INTUITIVE POSITION FOR A CALL BUTTON?

Per our research, users want to speak about their own unique personal circumstances with a live human being. Based on this insight and competitive analysis, we knew we needed to have a call button that allows users to quickly and easily request services, which is their main goal. But where should this button go?

ROUND 1

Only about half of users immediately noticed the call button. We also received some feedback that the button was a bit too small to press.

ROUND 2

We made the button larger, but also toyed with the idea of placing both a call button and a Send Message button above the main navigation bar. Users instead found AHS’s phone number through the Contact Us page rather than the convenient button - they now tended to overlook the buttons.

ROUND 3

Ultimately, we focused on only the call button and removed the Send Message button — users prefer speaking live with a human after all. The call button moved back to the main navigation bar, which tested well (100% completion, 0% error rate).

FINAL PROTOTYPES

 We made the following recommendations to At Home Solutions:

• Hire a copywriter to flesh out the content of the pages and keep the language appropriately professional and compassionate

• Ensure that the developer codes the website to be fully responsive (viewable in both mobile and desktop versions)

• Use only professional quality photographs (the stock photos, if used in the final website, would need to be purchased)