Customer Journey and UX Design
In 2013, I was approached with a unique opportunity to join a group of all senior-level creatives and strategists for an exciting—and a little daunting—new project. The agency Cibo in San Francisco was tapped to completely overhaul the Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital digital experience. The hospital was also undergoing a major renovation to its facilities, as well as exploring a new name and logo with a partner agency, adding another layer of complexity to the mix.
We were presented with their existing website, which was so full of content, research, and information that users were completely overwhelmed. We were tasked with developing a new customer journey that would improve the user experience for the parents of children referred to the hospital, as well as for referring physicians.
The goal we set for ourselves was to take them from concerned to confident. We wanted to create a beautiful, peaceful site that didn’t feel overwhelming and that helped visitors find all the resources they needed, quickly and easily.
Our target audience was the parents and family members that were being referred to the hospital with nothing but a very scary diagnosis for their young children. To help serve them the information they needed—plus a big dose of hope—we developed a website visually rich with success stories front and center when visitors arrived at the site. We wanted to give them the reassurance that their children were going to be in the very best hands.
We also sought to make it as easy as possible for site visitors to find the services and information they needed. This was where one of my own UX ideas first came to light: a smart predictive search bar. This functionality offered the most novice user the opportunity to type in a diagnosis, and the search feature would predictively return results that were categorized by services, doctors who treated the condition, relevant location information, articles on the topic, and all the other content they might want, without having to navigate deeper into the site. While search results like this are commonplace today, at the time this was a major shift in user experience design.
I’m so happy to report that the client loved how this smart bar simplified and enhanced the user experience for visitors. While the overall site has been updated over the years, the smart bar search feature and the rich taxonomy we developed for the content on the site remain a vital part of the hospital’s digital presence.
