BMI HEALTHCARE

Responsive web design

AUGUST 2013 - FEBRUARY 2014
ROLE: UX CONSULTANT
CLIENT: BMI HEALTHCARE
AGENCY: READING ROOM

LINKS: TRY IT OUT

Background

The healthcare industry is known for being rife with legacy technology and a "stuck in it's ways" mindset. There are dozens of startups that are trying to challenge this way of thinking and introduce a new "HealthTech" industry, just as FinTech is starting to do. With everything at our fingertips nowadays we want healthcare on demand, and we want to be able to access it anywhere, anytime. 

BMI Healthcare wanted to transform their digital services to better serve their patients, and the first product on the roadmap was to redesign their website to fit in with a multiple touch point service strategy. We approached this project with no existing research, so had to immerse ourselves into the world of a healthcare user to best design for their needs.

Our vision was to create a digital healthcare service that users could access anytime, from any device. They would hold an account that they would use to manage all aspects of their BMI healthcare ecosystem. The website would serve as a knowledge base and a method of being guided on your healthcare journey, from learning more about a condition, to booking a consultant and post treatment.

Research

A colleague and I undertook a first tranche of research to gather insights from consultants, nurses, call centre staff, and healthcare users to identify current pain points within their respective interaction with BMI and their understanding of private healthcare in general. As well as this, we looked into tactical business goals, digital footprint, competitor/comparators and their KPIs with the business participants. We covered a representative set of segments over a week, carrying out group sessions and one-to-one interviews.

The output of this was a hefty set of insights that I used to produce a set of personas for both users and internal staff, and a research report with findings.

IA & Design

Given the insights we gained from the research, I designed the IA and journeys to reflect the offline patient journey, enabling a user to interchange between offline and online as more services became available. The experience would guide them through each stage, enabling them to fill out one section and then simply click through to the next stage of the process, or go back to change anything. They would build up their "booking" as they progressed along. It catered for both private healthcare customers and NHS users, aiming at increasing the visibility between private and NHS, which is something our research identified as a problem.

The goal was to not only facilitate this journey for current BMI customers, but to provide a trustworthy brand experience for all users so that they could read up about conditions and gain vital information around costs and the private healthcare process.

Outputs

• I left Reading Room into March 2015 whilst the build for this was still being undertaken, as the project wasn't being run using Agile. The site went live in 2016.
• The site gives a user to have clear visibility of the patient journey, helping them through each stage regardless of at which point they begin their journey. The online account feature brings the service up to par with what customers expect these days with other services. 
• The site aims to increase visibility of private healthcare for the NHS users, giving clear advice on costings and how to access private healthcare.