Women’s Clinic of Northern Colorado

I was approached by the Women's Clinic of Northern Colorado to examine their user experience from start to finish. This project covered everything from search engine optimization (SEO) and branding to user experience (UX) to a long-term product/service vision. To make sure the guests felt comfortable providing genuine feedback, I hired a team of four female research assistants to complete the customer interviews and help with Define portion of the project.

Step 1: Empathize

To understand the customer's goals and challenges throughout their experience, I segmented the customer journey into six parts: a need for care, research and self-diagnosis, the decision to visit a provider, pre-visit activities, meeting with a provider, and follow-up.

The first three segments of the customer journey involved a competitive analysis and heuristics on their current digital footprint. I focused on answering the question, “How do people find and choose WCNC?” I analyzed their SEO, marketing channels, presence on review sites, etc.

The latter three sections of the customer journey involved face-to-face interviews and a follow-up survey with a stratified random sample of the Women’s Clinic’s current customer base. I also did a walkthrough of the check-in, procedure, and checkout processes to gain empathy for what it was like to be a patient.

Step 2: Define

After gathering a plethora of information, the team and I started synthesizing the research. We were looking for themes and patterns across the customer's responses. We grouped this information by what customers were doing, thinking, and feeling at each of the six segments.

Where ideas clashed, we took note and used those conflicting ideas to create survey questions to gather quantitative data to make informed decisions in the Ideation phase.

From there, we created emotionally charged personas that accurately reflected the customer sentiment of the surveys. Then we mapped out each persona’s journey and the challenges that they individually faced with they experiences.

Step 3: Ideate

To start forming solutions, we took a close look at the pain points our personas experienced during their customer journeys to come up with a series of “how might we (HMW)…” statements. Here are a few examples of our “how might we…” statements:

• How might we make sure that doctors match well with patients both medically and personally?

• How might we help patients understand what is normal and what is not normal between appointments?

• How might we help patients feel their time is valued?

• How might we help ease the scared and frustrated feelings that some patients feel with their diagnosis?

• How might help foster excitement, caring, and love throughout the patient's experience?

Step 4: Deliver

The final deliverable for this project was a distilled vision of what the Women’s Clinic could be broken down into three, five, and ten year milestones. The team and I were able to come up with numerous innovative ideas to improve the customer experience at each stage of the customer journey while continuing to grow the business.

You may have noticed we skipped over the prototype step. Prototyping our ideas and suggestions was left to the Women’s Clinic because it involved many staff members across different teams. However, we did assist with laying out possible tests and the creation of key performance indicators (KPI’s) to evaluate the success or failure of each prototype. WCNC is currently iterating on our suggestions with our KPI’s as a guide.