Signature Medical Group

Patients came most often to find a doctor, so the redesign made Find a Doctor more prominent: first in the menu and a search panel on the homepage. It stayed first through a 2021 rebuild.

One feature, start to finish Making Find a Doctor more prominent

  • Research found the real problem
  • Design designed the answer
  • Measurement measurement not shown here

No analytics measured the new menu after launch. What survives shows the design lasted, not what it changed for patients.

Read the full study →

Context

Why did this work matter?

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Signature Medical Group is owned by its 110-plus doctors at some 30 locations in St. Louis and Kansas City. Nothing on its dated site led you to what you came for.

Assumptions

What did we believe going in?

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We believed most patients came to find a doctor: fairly sure, not certain.

Research

How was it tested?

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From October 2014 to January 2015 we took an analytics baseline, ran a one-question site survey that drew more than eighty answers, interviewed six patients for an hour each, and walked through six other healthcare sites.

Discoveries

What did we learn?

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Finding a physician was a top reason for a visit, at 25.3%, about as common as reaching health records. On phones and tablets, 76% of visits that started on a doctor's profile left from it.

Intervention

What changed because of it?

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Find a Doctor went first in the main menu and again on the homepage, as a search panel beside Find a Practice. The site map I drew planned that search before the build.

The 2015 sitemap: a six-level tree of wireframe page thumbnails under Home, with Find a Physician drawn as a search control attached to the homepage rather than as a section of its own, primary navigation and utility links set out to the right, eight numbered orange annotations explained beneath, and a title block naming the client, project, document, version, date and author
The March 2015 site map; note 1 puts the doctor search on the homepage.

Outcome

What was the impact?

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The site launched in February 2016, after I left, with no analytics, so I can't say whether more patients found a doctor. The Internet Archive and live site show Find a Doctor still first after another team's 2021 rebuild.

The rebuilt homepage: Find a Doctor leading a four-item primary navigation, above a masthead whose photograph of a clinician and patient sits under a teal scrim, then the Find a Doctor and Find a Practice search panel beside a Doctor Spotlight
Find a Doctor leads the menu and comes first again on the page.

Also on this project

Read the full study →

  • Health records, the second reason for a visit at 24.1%, came out of the footer onto every page.

  • Leaders split on online scheduling, so the site took appointment requests per doctor instead.

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