Senior Wellness Assessment

A comprehensive wellness assessment designed with the usability and well-being needs for a senior population.

Client

WebMD Health Services

Responsibilities

Strategy, UX, Product Design, User Research, Interaction, UI, UX Copy, Graphic Design

Deliverables

Mobile and Desktop UX, UI
Digital and Print Results Report
User Flows + Wireframes
Prototype

We needed a fresh assessment experience with a question set for the Medicare segment. This would help our senior population achieve better outcomes and connect with the right services, while also opening up a new line of business.

Project SUmmary

WebMD’s core assessment helped users identify and evaluate their well-being over a comprehensive set of wellness factors. This experience did a great job helping our users identify and improve their health and well-being. It didn’t, however, take into consideration health and wellness factors for older populations.

This included things like mobility, needs for medication management programs, and fall risk. The business wanted to break into the Medicare segment. To do that, we needed a CMS-compliant wellness assessment for that population.

Goals
  • Reduce the number of questions in the assessment, while capturing additional information on senior-specific risks
  • Design and develop an experience that was more accessible and easier to use
  • Simplify the experience and results; make improvements to the experience's overall heuristics
  • Increase the completion rate and customer rating
  • Reduce the amount of time to complete the assessment
Legacy HA landing screen

APPROACH

  • Heuristic analysis of legacy assessment experience
  • Secondary research on cognitive and dexterity needs of advanced senior populations 
  • Competitive analysis of other senior experiences and services (i.e., AARP and Medicare sites)
  • User research with seniors to test comprehension and perceived value, both on the legacy and new senior experiences
  • Usability testing and user interviews to assess ease-of-use, error rates, completion times, and satisfaction
exploration

Our core assessment had some core heuristic flaws. Context switching between sections and unclear status or imprecise language made it challenging to complete, and some sections required our users to recall very specific, detailed health information. This meant a heavy cognitive load, something we wanted to keep to a minimum.

The assessment results were also unclear at times, especially in terms of the health score, the risk details, and what to do next. The real value of the experience is the output, so we wanted to make sure we were making the results easier to understand and use. 

Landing Screen
We really wanted to highlight that the user could start anywhere. This allowed us to take advantage of the endowed progress to motivate (re)completion, and made it clearer that which sections needed updating.
Results Screen
Inputs, Navigation, and Confirmations
The content had to be fully exportable into a comprehensive, printable PDF. Users saw this as incredibly valuable, as the summary could be used as a discussion companion for conversations with their doctors, so the print button needed to be easily visible from all sections. This was present even in the earliest designs.
You can see how that translated into the final designs here. We added the same results overview and summary to the print report.

REcommendations

Our final designs included a number of heuristic improvements.

Improve basic heuristics

Heuristic enhancements improved the UX for everyone. For seniors specifically, we added larger touch targets and text, adjusted the language to make it friendlier and easier to read, and added better status and progress indicators.
We also reduced the need to scroll, making it more mobile-friendly. Adjustments to the visual language and hierarchy also allowed us to reduce the text, making it clearer and easier to scan and navigate.

Make it personal and empowering

One of the biggest complaints that turned up when testing our legacy assessment was that it didn't feel like it was for them. It felt clinical, and most were concerned about the stigmas attached to the "senior" label. We chose to make a much friendlier experience with the language and lifestyle imagery, which included empowered seniors thriving and modeling positive wellness behaviors.

Reduce cognitive load

In addition to reducing the number of questions, we re-ordered the questions to reduce cognitive load. In the results screen, we also chose to reduce the amount of information displayed for each risk so the user could decide which one(s) (s)he wished to learn more about, meaning it was more scan-able and less overwhelming.

Leverage behavioral science​

In our legacy experience, we would ask users whether they wanted to work on a particular risk just before the results were revealed. For the senior experience, we opted to integrate these questions throughout the assessment to capture intent while the evidence was visible and the subject was top-of-mind.

Encourage and persuade

In addition to integrating "willingness to change" questions, we opted to add feedback to the digital experience. For example, if someone was already eating well, we congratulated them. If they hadn't, we offered some context on the risks and benefits to persuade them and empower them to make more informed decisions. This made the experience friendlier and more conversational, but it also made it more persuasive.

Make the results more meaningful

The wellness score had the opportunity to convey improvement and achievement. We gave users a snapshot of their greatest strengths and biggest opportunities of improvement with a much clearer score in a new Overview section. We also applied a basic personalization algorithm to a prioritized set of next steps to make improvement based on risk severity and the user's desire to work on that facet of their wellness. We applied this same concept to the comprehensive risk set. We focused the experience by moving this to a Risks section.

Final designs

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