Children's Memorial Hospital

Children's Memorial Hospital is one of the most prestigious children's hospitals in the country, with over one thousand specialists focusing on 70 pediatric specialties. They are home to a premier center for pediatric research and practice the most advanced techniques with the newest technology.

Redesign highlights

Integrated content management system: Children's uses our most advanced content management system to date. Editing of page content is handled directly within the site that the public sees. Once a user logs in, they see a simple editing bar that exposes all available editing tools on any page. This makes it easy for the user that has limited computer skills, since they navigate the site exactly as a non-user would. Currently, there are about 100 users that have access to this system. Features of the iCMS include, multi-level authoring width editorial approval, meta data, featured stories, image and file management, and configurable home page and menus.

Traditional content management system: Children's also uses our more traditional sytem, which is accessed through a separate website, to maintain more complex content such as their store, special events, and continuing medical education.

• Find a Doctor with online appointment requests
• Job postings with online applications, integrated with an HR applicant and job tracking system
• 1300+ pages of content, with more than half containing detailed clinical content.
• Special registrations/donations (Marathon Team, Radiothon, Car Raffle, Kids Day, Step Up for Kids and many more)
• Continuing medical education pages: videos and articles with related quizzes for earning CME credits. Participants can track their credits and print certificates of earned credit.
• Donations + store

How do you make a good site better? A usability study

Anna Melnick's* 11-year-old daughter is what some in the health care business call a "frequent flyer." She has multiple health conditions requiring regular visits to Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago.

Anna has been "googling" the web for months but has found little information directly related to her daughter's problems. Although the home page of Anna's browser has been set to the Children's site for nearly two years, she didn't know it contained that the exact type of clinical content she needed.

During a listening lab usability test, we asked Anna to find material on the Children's site about one of her child's conditions. She was ecstatic when she found precisely what she was looking for, but only after we gave her a hint. This simple observation showed that the tab housing clinical content was labeled with jargon that was meaningful only to hospital staff. Nearly all parents we observed later experienced the same confusion.

*Name changed for privacy reasons.

Findings

Through interviews and listening lab usability tests, we discovered opportunities to enhance the already well-performing website. For example:

• Rename tabs and links to better reflect the underlying content.
• Integrate interactive mapping to make it easier for parents to locate physicians, clinics and satellites near their home or workplace.
• Feature doctors—and the clinical content they have written—on the home page. This will help encourage doctors to produce unique content that drives traffic to the website.
• Leverage the reputation of physicians and programs by posting brief video interviews of leading on-staff physicians and researchers.
• Devise ways to better support the networks of referring physicians and clinics, through which many patients find their way to the hospital.

Children's Memorial's website has been doing very well over the past few years. Traffic is up considerably, job applications have increased by several factors, additional "long tail" clinical content (material about rare conditions) has greatly improved Google rankings, and more new patients find the hospital through the website. The site has also recently won several national design awards. But in the rapidly evolving Web world, if you're not getting better, you're getting worse. Our task is to find ways to get better.

The challenge

How do you make it easy for parents to find information that encourages them to choose Children's for their kids' medical care? And how do you discover opportunities to better support referring pediatricians and clinics?

"Ah ha!" moments

"Health topics and conditions" link misnamed. CMH staff understood that this link was to a glossary of medical terms with one-line summaries. Parents thought that it linked to detailed descriptions of medical conditions. This confusion often discouraged further exploration of the site.

"Outside in" versus "inside out" thinking. When parents search for a doctor, they assume that "locations" refers to where parents live, not where care is delivered. Parents look at the site from "outside in;" we look from "inside out." We needed to make changes that support their point of view.

Simpler is better. Many job seekers can skip two out of five application screens without harm.

Our approach

How the contextual research project progressed:

• Design the research. We reviewed the entire site and Google Analytics reports. We met with marketing personnel to learn which areas are important from a business point of view. We wrote scenarios and questions for interviews and listening lab usability tests which were reviewed and approved by the hospital.
• Run the tests. We conducted interviews and listening labs with 17 people, including parents, doctors, nurses, and staff.
• Analyze the results. We viewed screen and voice recordings, transcribed revealing portions onto "affinity notes," and sorted them into related functional and conceptual categories. After comparing the notes with applicable portions of the website, we devised a list of possible improvements.
• Present our findings. We created an extensive summary, including audio and video snippets, and presented them to the client.
• Improve the website. We are making many of the changes we proposed and will test our solutions with several visitors.

Since Children's Memorial Hospital engaged Webitects—and in July 2005 launched a redesigned site using their custom content management system—childrensmemorial.org has won several major design awards.

In my experience, Webitects does far more than create pretty pages; they have been proactive business partners, helping us to problem-solve and think through a variety of issues.

— Kerry Otto, Manager of Web Communications