Epworth Hospital has engaged us to redesign the digital maternity experience to look like a microsite. The uplift is aimed at providing mothers with a beautiful experience to help them make decisions on their preferred hospital to birth.
Our challenge was to conduct user research with mothers who have engaged Epworth in the past and uncover firsthand insights that will help guide our design decisions.
The new maternity website also has to utilise the warmth and comfort archetype which has consist of the core Epworth colours and an array of supporting colours.
To begin, we had a kick-off meeting with the stakeholders to discuss our plan of attack. We came to agreement that, for us to better understand the users we were designing for, we’d first meet the midwives and team members from the maternity ward.
The purpose of this meeting is for us to understand the different types of mothers who have engaged with Epworth in the past, what are the current clinical offerings available at the hospital and what are some of the frustrations and pain points.
Epworth then engaged with their private Facebook group to recruit the different types of mothers from our discussion for us to conduct user interviews for a deeper understanding of their experience.
However, we were working with a tight deadline. While the recruitment process were happening, we agreed with the stakeholders that we will commence with initial design concepts based on our conversations with the midwives. We also needed a look and feel sign off from the stakeholders.
We worked with the stakeholders to refine the prototype to a stage where they were happy with it before we presented them in our interviews for user testing.
So, then we dived in to a 2 week research sprint and we conducted 6 user interviews. The first half of these interviews were exploratory to uncover insights such as why they chose Epworth, when was the last time they engaged with the website, pain points and frustrations they had with it. In the second half, we brought up our clickable prototype for the users to test.
Due to the limited sample size, we used the Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation method. After every interview, we iterated the designs and tested it with our next interviewee.
From the interviews, the mothers reiterated some well-known highlights of the Epworth maternity experience.
Outcomes from these interviews have been translated into the design of the new Maternity website. While not every item were actionable due to privacy and other concerns from the stakeholders, we included them as recommendations in our final showcase to Epworth.
To represent the mothers at Epworth, we also created personas based on the insights that we’ve collected from our interviews.
In Lisa’s pregnancy journey, she is very nervous because she has gone through many rounds of IVF. Because of this, she is constantly concerned about the growth of her baby and is very protective of her pregnancy. She’s always seeking comfort and guidance throughout her pregnancy.
Goals: What’s really important for Lisa in her pregnancy is to feel supported by the medical staffs. She wants to know that the staffs are going to be there for her and to make her feel warm and personalised during her care. She doesn’t want anything to go wrong but if something were to happen, she wants to know that the staffs are there for her.
Stacey has had a traumatic first birth with the public system. She is frustrated and disappointed cause she did not get the support and guidance she needed. As a result, she is scared for her second birth and ends up choosing a private hospital to have a more consistent continuity of care.
Goals: In her second birth, she is looking a completely different experience. She’s willing to pay out of pocket so that she doesn’t have to go through what she went through in her first pregnancy. She is very cautious and anxious; she wants to see statistics around clinical birth data and read positive birth experiences from other mothers.
Because she’s paying out of pocket, she also wants better clarity around the fee structure. Knowing what the final costs are with her pregnancy will help avoid any surprises in her final hospital bill.
Lastly we have Millie, a first-time mum. She’s very optimistic, excited, comfortable and positive about her maternity journey. She feels very fortunate to be able to have a private obstetrician and she really hopes that she’d be able to experience the Park Hyatt stay - popping a bottle champagne and celebrating post birth in a hotel room with her husband.
Goals: Being a first-time mum, Millie is looking for a memorable birth experience. Things that matter to her are getting a hotel-level service. Her main concerns are about current COVID restriction. So, being able to easily access this information on the website would really help her. She wants to navigate and find information she needs more easily on the website.
From our research, we know that users want to find content relevant to their journey easily. To help with this, we designed a journey stepper that would allow mothers to navigate to the different stages in their pregnancy –from planning a pregnancy to post pregnancy. With this stepper, Epworth is able to curate content that is relevant to the different stages in a mother’s pregnancy.
We reviewed the IA and created consolidated pages for both Epworth hospitals with maternity ward facilities. Mothers can decide which hospital they want to birth at and find useful information based on the location.
From our research, we also heard mothers rave about the food at Epworth. We created a page that will allow mothers to see how serious Epworth is about their food. Epworth will also be able to upload sample menus for mothers to preview.
We designed a maternity website that was aimed at creating a beautiful experience for mothers making their decision on their preferred hospital to birth at, as well as creating a consolidated view of Epworth’s Geelong and Freemason hospital sites. The new maternity website is now live on the Epworth website.
We also set up dashboards to measure the success of our designs and we have seen increase in total views and users who have requested to tour the maternity wards.