Role: Project and Content Manager, IA Designer
MultiCare Health is a health system serving patients across Washington State. I’ve worked on several web projects with their various communications teams. Most notably, site structure and page building for their main site overhaul.
The main site for MultiCare health system is massive, with over a thousand pages serving users across eight hospitals and around 500 clinics. I joined the project part way through to help reorganize content to fit the new page template designs and to improve the information architecture of service lines and hospitals.
The team had access to user feedback from an onsite feedback survey. I read through at the beginning of the project and saw there was consistently frustration about how dense the original site was. Wherever possible I tried to incorporate images or break text up into digestible pieces as we put together the new site.
See below for an example of a page before and after redesign.
MultiCare has been expanding in the last several years. As they acquire new organizations, their site content and service offerings need to be folded into the site. The site often takes an “inside-out” approach, with each program presenting their own content on service offerings. This leads to duplicate serviceline information for eastern and western washington. As we moved content over, we had the opportunity to tackle this and restructure the pages to be “outside-in”.
Using Bariatrics as an example I did a card sorting exercise with two groups of 30, one with older participants and another with younger folks. I took each exisiting page and made it a card, and asked the organize the cards into the categories that made sense to them. Both groups would expect information about the serviceline to be generalized, rather than attached to a specific location.
I also did user interviews with a panel of three people, they also found it confusing to have to navigate to specific center before getting generalized information bariatrics.
You can read the write up from card sort and user interviews here.
Based on the feedback from the card sort and interviews, I created a set of pages with generalized bariatrics information. Each of these pages link to the regional center sections for more information about the specific services in each program.
You can view the bariatrics pages here.
There are some internal hurdles and alignment that need to happen to make this “outside-in” approach possible across all service lines. As we work through those blockers I’d like to implement this structure for the other service lines and do another round of user testing to find out where else we can improve the intuitiveness of the navigation.