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Creating a sparkling shop-window for Hartford Care

Creating a sparkling shop-window for Hartford Care

Client

Hartford Care

Role

UX/UI Designer

Year

2020

The company

Hartford Care has provided residential, dementia and nursing care since 2003. They’re renowned for being a consistent and high quality care provider, with an emphasis on care, comfort, and companionship.


They were interested in the development of a new website, and so enquired with The Designlab to pitch for the job.

My role in the project

For this project, I was tasked with designing a new website for the care provider that would align with their existing branding.

Context

This project came about whilst I was working at The Designlab.

Hartford Care were in desperate need of modernising their website. Their existing solution was old and it showed. As more users became accustomed to new patterns on user interfaces, it was causing Hartford Care to have a dramatic conversion rate drop YoY.

Challenges

This project was limited to a small budget as you sometimes see with agency work.

In order to alleviate this challenge, I held a half-day workshop with the clients where we used card sorting and journey mapping to ensure that we concentrated our efforts on the primary flow pages.

Workshop

As mentioned in challenges, to kick the project off we held a half-day workshop with a range of internal stakeholders.

The goal of the workshop was to align on Hartford Cares objectives for the project, to gain a strong understanding their users, to highlight the key flows and to understand what existing content worked and could be repurposed.

Two of the unexpected outcomes from the workshop were:


  • Hartford Care had seen a progressive rise in recent years of elderly people visiting and enquiring through the website, rather than their children.


  • The existing website had a lot of great SEO-led content that could be repurposed for the new solution.


  • Hartford Care were suffering due to a lack of staff in their care homes, a key focus for them on this project was to attract new staff through a careers area.

How Might We’s

Based upon the findings from the workshop, we developed a number of How Might We’s that would assist us when trying to identify solutions:


  • How might we cater the website to be used by their new elderly user persona?


  • How might we repurpose the strong content that already exists on their current website?


  • How might we modernise the website visually to compete in the current market?


  • How might we attract new care home staff through the website?

Solution

For the prototype, I created a style I tried to emulate a style that would feel modern but familiar for elderly users. The website was designed adhering to the WCAG 2.0 guidelines to a AA standard.

Much of the content for the existing website was repurposed to sit on the new website. The SEO requirements for the website were heavily optimised as the WCAG guidelines complements this (since screen readers interpret websites in the same way as they do on Google).

Testing

Going into testing, we hypothesised that:


  • Users would be able to navigate between different orders.


  • Users would be able to tell what stage the parcel delivery is at.


For the test, we asked 100 participants to complete/answer 4 tasks/questions in an unmoderated setting to measure the success rate of key actions. I chose to conduct unmoderated tests due to the budget constraints and ability to gain vital insights.

By using Maze, we could capture qualitative insights through screen and front-facing camera recordings.

Outcomes

User feedback since the websites launch has been positive seeing a 7% increase to care home visitation enquiries and a 23% decrease to job application drop-offs.

Further changes have since been made to the website since it’s launch, and this is expected to continue as Hartford Care keeps growing.