I work on a health and social care service. Meaning that sometimes content designers are asked to put information into the service last minute to reduce clinical risk. Of course, this not going to provide the best user experience.
Recently, it was my job to iterate content that a colleague had added for this situation. The content was a very long explanation of health data. We cannot clean or manipulate this data (yet), so it was hard to understand.
This explanation was about 800 words long. Users would need to scroll past this to view their health data. Unsurprisingly, this tested poorly. It caused cognitive overload and did not help users understand their information, because they weren’t reading it.
Brainstorming ideas
There are steps I take when iterating content that isn’t meeting users needs.
- Think about the purpose of this information
- Understand the limitations you’re working with
- Revisit the guidelines and frameworks you work to
The purpose of this information is to help users understand their health data. The health data includes codes and strange words that are there for doctors to view.
I worked with my UX design colleague to brainstorm ideas. Our initial thought was to have explanations right beside the data, showing only when codes or certain words appear. But there was a technical limitation with this, so that was scrapped.
We then discussed using a component such as an accordion to reduce the volume of content users view at once. We assumed that users would scan headings to find the information they need, making their task easier (but we’d need to test this assumption). With this, there was a clinical limitation – our clinicians wanted users to view the full information at once to reduce risk. So this was also rejected.
Due to limitations and time constraints with our upcoming release, we agreed that the best we could do for now was to make the content more scannable. With the intention to revisit these ideas when they’re more feasible.
Making information easier to digest
This is when my guidelines and frameworks come in. I iterated the content to improve readability, by:
- removing or replacing complicated language
- adding lots of descriptive headings
- shortening paragraphs and sentences, reducing the word count
- adding bulleted lists
- using components to highlight crucial information
We decided to test having this information on a separate screen, so that the health data would sit on its own and users would not have to scroll heavily to view it.
The result
We completed A/B testing on both versions, and the iterated content tested better with participants. They found it easier to digest, but the structure of the page still was not meeting their needs.
Participants found it tedious to have an extra screen to click through, which was a fascinating insight. We assumed that this design would be preferred (showing the importance of testing and not relying on designer assumption).
We could only complete one round of testing, so we decided to add all information back into one screen, but with the improvements.
Next steps
I get moved around to work on whatever is priority for the upcoming release, so I’m not working on this piece of content currently.
But whichever content designer works on this next, the hope is that we can begin manipulating the data to make it more understandable. We’ll remove medical jargon and data that is not useful for users (using that recent round of testing as evidence).
This will reduce the data explanation significantly, hopefully to a few lines or so. Improving the user experience and helping users understand their information much better.
June Caldwell - senior UX writer and content designer 