Healthcare Bluebook
A website to empower healthcare consumers
We built a website to help our client protect consumers nationwide from overpriced, low-quality healthcare
Background
Healthcare Bluebook was founded in 2007 to solve a critical problem: creating more transparency within the healthcare system and helping employers guide their employees to get high-quality healthcare at a reasonable price. But to effectively guide site users to find a “fair price,” Healthcare Bluebook needed to transform its website by improving functionality, navigation, and on-page guidance. Fresh delivered a multi-phased body of work, diving into the Healthcare Bluebook’s core challenges and revamping its primary digital touchpoint.
Challenges
- Defining a baseline of the current site, what was working, and what wasn’t.
- Empowering consumers to easily find affordable healthcare that matches their needs.
- Developing a phased, concurrent approach to design and development to accelerate the launch.
Services & Capabilities
Phase 0: Establishing a strategic baseline
The project began with our team analyzing the existing website experience. A deep dive into sales, customer satisfaction scores, site engagement, and user acquisition gave us a hypothesis about what to address. We also conducted a discovery workshop with Healthcare Bluebook stakeholders to validate our initial ideas. Doing so helped us align on their business goals, ideate on potential solutions, and define the focus for the rest of the engagement.
The graphic below shows the logic of their internal system, optimized for seamless usability. But understanding the experience’s foundation and building on top of it was essential.
Phase 1: Understanding users and business requirements
Seven one-on-one interviews with Healthcare Bluebook stakeholders helped us develop an independent, unbiased assessment of areas of opportunity, business objectives, and site requirements. We balanced those insights against our findings about users, which enabled us to create authentic personas and identify where HCBB was falling short (relative to its competitors) in serving users.
Our recommended areas of focus included:
- Optimizing core pages and their CTAs.
- Streamlining navigation.
- Revamping site content and messaging.
- Modernizing designs to showcase the brand and promote accessibility.
Phase 2: Creating user stories and strategic website pathways
We created an initial map of the existing website experience in the initial phase. Doing so allowed us to identify areas for optimization, but it was also essential to talk with Healthcare Bluebook’s primary users and ensure the site addressed their needs. We converted the insights into user stories like the following:
- As a patient researching doctors
- I can find the best specialist for my needs so
- I can feel comfortable and confident in my provider.
The primary goal of the Healthcare Bluebook site is to help employers and their employees find high-quality healthcare at an affordable price. Design decisions based on user stories achieved that overarching goal.
Phase 3: Building the site and materializing design concepts
The final design phase involved bringing the site structure to life by leveraging the Healthcare Bluebook brand. Design decisions were based primarily on the utility of helping users find healthcare information. But to build credibility for a growing company, choosing colors, graphics, and design styles that established trust was essential.
An iterative approach to brand work and prototyping allowed us to confidently launch into user testing and mockup development.
End-to-end design and development collaboration
Cross-disciplinary collaboration between designers and developers is essential to our approach at Fresh. Including developers throughout the design and strategy phases helps the team understand the feasibility of a design, estimate deadlines properly, and stay within budget while still going above and beyond for the client.
Our collaborative approach with Healthcare Bluebook allowed the team to launch the website on schedule and deliver value out of the gate.
