Summary

The Marshfield Clinic Health System (MCHS) blog, Shine365, is a crucial communication and marketing tool for the health system providing in-depth health and wellness information for their patients and the public. The blog team had goals to increase readership and convert more readers to patients but didn’t know how well the was serving its readers and thought a redesign was needed. Through my research, I wanted to understand why and how readers engage with the blog, their pain points, and what they do after finishing a blog post. This research uncovered that highly-engaged blog readers are already MCHS patients and overall, the blog design was meeting their needs, meaning our team could avoid a costly redesign and instead make smaller design changes.

My Role

User Experience Strategist, Researcher, and Designer and Project Manager

TOOLS

• Webex

• Figma

• HotJar

• Google Analytics

• Airtable

• Miro

• PowerPoint

METHODS

• Google Analytics

• Heatmapping

• Comparative Analysis

• Surveying

• Directed-Storytelling User Interviews and Usability Testing

• Affinity Diagramming

The Marshfield Clinic Health System’s Shine365 blog was originally created in 2015 to replace an MCHS print publication and is built on a CMS different from its website. No design updates have been made to it since its launch, but the blog, along with an accompanying newsletter, has become an important vehicle for publishing relevant health and wellness information. The blog content team wanted to increase readership and try using it as a marketing tool for the health system. Little was known about the blog readers, their motivations, how they utilized it and its content, and if the blog met their needs. 

To answer this question, I wanted to understand how users access and use the blog by looking at Google Analytics and heatmapping data and watching anonymized videos of users on the blog. I also wanted to understand how other health systems utilize blogs. Most importantly, I needed to learn about the user group, their motivations, pain points, and desires. I did this first with a survey targeted at blog readers, and from the 1,000+ survey respondents, I recruited ten blog readers for directed storytelling user interviews mixed with some usability testing to dig into the factors that influence a visit to the blog, how they get to the blog, what they’re thinking and feeling when they read a blog post, how they navigate around the blog, and their expectations.

1. Readers find value in the blog, and the overall design works for users. When the MCHS website is redesigned, incorporate the blog into that website and do a redesign at that point. 

   • Most highly engaged readers access the blog through the weekly Shine365 email, and without the email, they don’t know how to access the blog or are not even sure if there is another way.

2. Simplify the design to focus on the content and most-used features and remove confusing or unused elements.

   • The blog design is pretty minimal, but the tags and share icons were some of the brightest elements on the page between the title and the article. The social media share icons are rarely used, so I recommended making them gray and only displaying the services and actions that readers use. Blog readers also do not know the purpose of tags, so I recommended removing the tags under the title.

   • After a reader finishes an article, they will most likely check out the related posts in the right column. My recommendation was to move the related posts higher in the right column and also to rename the tags section to “Related categories,” so readers know that is another way to find similar content. 

   • My other recommendation for simplifying the design is to move the Marshfield Clinic services information to the nav bar and remove the MCHS “ad” from the right column because readers don’t notice them or use them.

After discussing my findings with the stakeholders, we agreed to implement changes that could be made to the current template, and when an MCHS website redesign happens, use the research findings to inform the design for the new blog.

The proposed changes:

1. Move the menu of MCHS services from the right column to a submenu above the main navigation.

2. Simplify the navigation and create a dropdown for the topic areas.

3. Remove the tags under the title except for the main category.

4. Move the share buttons to the right side of the main content area, make them gray so they’re less prominent, and only display the used services.

5. Move Related Posts higher in the right column.

6. Rename the tags section to Related Categories in the right column, and change the color of the tags to a brand color, such as blue.