CVS Health
Designing a new taxonomy to promote patient education & service discovery
The problem
The MinuteClinic digital experience has historically skewed towards the transactional over educational for patients. That's great for return users who know what they want and are familiar with our services — but this project was aimed at bringing more balance to the discovery & service areas of our site. We wanted to provide patients access to more information, while clarifying options & existing pathways at the same time.
"...general navigational confusion"
Final designs (process below)
Final designs often appear simple, but the process is not. How did we get here?
FIRST
What needs fixing & why are we doing this?
Our design team recently finished developing content for 135+ service pages, but there was no direct way to access them. Our first priority in the redesign was to create this link, however, there were a number of other gaps to address along the way. While much of our site pushes users towards scheduling, the 'pre' and 'post' scheduling experiences are drastically underrepresented, or not represented at all. Since global navigation can be a sensitive area, I began this work by outlining the gaps & goals within navigation that would critically improve the patient experience.
AND
Auditing our existing desktop & mobile navigation
Since MinuteClinic lives within the larger CVS digital ecosystem, the navigation actually has three high-level layers: enterprise (CVS.com), local (MinuteClinic), and temporary high demand (COVID-19 services). While most of my design work would focus on our local navigation (and baking COVID-19 into that), the broader ecosystem was very important to consider every step of the way. Through auditing the current experience I not only got a better understanding of everything we were linking to today, but uncovered a lot of bad experiences.
NEXT
Research: a hybrid card sort to inform our taxonomy
Developing a new taxonomy is a complicated IA endeavor. After coming up with a new navigation proposal, I stepped back to gather user insight through a hybrid card-sort study. The top layer categories from my new proposal, along with 32 MinuteClinic user tasks, were presented to a broad range of participants for grouping. They also had the ability to create their own category if the ones provided didn't fit their mental model. The card sort was launched in Optimal Workshop by a taxonomist & researcher that I was lucky enough to have supporting me in the execution & analysis of this phase of research.
AFTER
Results & revisions for a round two study
We gained some really interesting insights from the first card sort (outlined below in key takeaways) that informed our second launch of the same study. To address some of the confusion that came up in our initial approach, we renamed 'get care' to 'schedule a visit', and returned the 'insurance & payment' category to 'insurance & pricing' (existing name). After launching the study again, these small revisions proved very successful, and we were able to achieve a strong consensus with the newest top-level categories.
THEN
Analyzing the competitive landscape & iterating on design patterns
'Seeing what's out there' is an important part of any design process. I felt this was particularly important for a navigation redesign — where good, familiar patterns and refined interactions are extra critical. In addition to nomenclature & taxonomy structures, I became interested in trends like visual menu styles and descriptive copy elements. Details like these could be leveraged to encourage quick, cognitive understanding of different selections. If navigation options are more clear to users, less patients are likely end up in the wrong place, or have mismatched expectations between their selection and where they land.
Final thoughts...
During the MinuteClinic global navigation redesign, CVS began a parallel project where they decided to move away from business units having their own navigation. This is a good thing for CVS users at large, and presented another lesson in adapting.
Our research & taxonomy was absorbed into the enterprise work, serving as the new top-level 'health' site navigation. I look forward to the launch of this enterprise work, and it's positive impact on users having a more cohesive and seamless navigation experience across all of CVS.com.
