East Kent Hospitals

Streamlining content and IA to improve findability

INDUSTRY: NHS TRUST - HOSPITALS

The challenge

East Kent Hospitals had an urgent need to move their site to a new CMS platform to comply with statutory requirements. The site had grown organically over years, with devolved publishing across a large number of varied departments. The site had reached a point where the information architecture had become very complex to navigate with lots of duplicate and outdated content.

The tools

Stakeholder workshop
Review previous audience research
Card sorting
Sitemap

The research journey

Although the site had three primary audiences: patients/visitors; health professionals and staff; job seekers. The purpose of this rapid phase was to focus entirely on the number one user group: patients and visitors. This was my priority for the fast turnaround during phase one.

East Kent Hospitals comms team already had an in-depth understanding of their users due to previous research. Therefore I ran a stakeholder workshop that focused on exploring user journeys and an card sorting options to build on the knowledge of users’ needs.

During my initial research, the key cognitive journey that users undertake when attending a hospital became very clear. Often and understandably in a state of heightened stress, users take things one step at a time. User firstly ask ‘How do I get to the hospital?’ and then once over the threshold of the hospital entrance, questions such as ‘where do I go?' and 'who can I talk to?’ naturally arise next. Users assume that once at the hospital any further questions about the visit or stay can be answered in person.

This provided me with a clear steer for how to restructure the site, surfacing contact information for the five hospitals primarily and improving the structure and taxonomies of the services content. In addition, signposting and cross referencing through the content was an absolutely fundamental aspect of the information architecture.

A heuristic card sort also helped to efficiently inform this research journey, combined with best practice experience with a range of alternative (competitor) public and private multi-hospital websites. In particular a hospital has a huge range of services, clinics, wards, departments, for which the taxonomies were somewhat confusing to end users. In the image, I have shared just a sample of these.

A key part of my task was to discover how to improve the ways in which users could find what they needed. This involved a combination of taxonomy review so to avoid internal language as well as improving filtering and cross referencing within service page templates.

The outcomes

A robust IA, based on users' needs led to a smooth UX and UI design process, which hit the deadline with one week to spare. The site is being built and populated with content during Spring 2023, initially pulling content from an archive as new content is created and will thereafter showcase the structural work, based on user need.