Real world examples of design that allowed users to help themselves

Episode Transcript

Moderator:  Welcome to one question with UpTop Health. Today the article we’re going to cover is Design That Allows Users to Help Themselves. We are joined by Michael Woo and Craig Nishizaki and the question I have is, do you guys have any real world examples of design that allowed users to help themselves? Craig, could you go first, please?

Craig: Yeah, sure. We were thinking through this in terms of the work that we’d been doing over the years regarding healthcare specific work that we’ve done. An example would be the Premera member portal redesign, where we worked on thinking about the experience for that member throughout their journey. So, looking at how someone would search for a plan, compare plans, and then once they sign up, how they would learn about consuming their benefits, and identify doctors that are in the network or providers that are in the network versus out. Being able to get social proof, ratings and reviews, to help them select a provider, looking at the pharmacy benefits and all those things that a member would do, and would want to do, within that experience so that they wouldn’t have to jump out to different third-party services or other websites.

During that process, we created a concept prototype that walked the member through that experience and allowed them to input certain details upfront, almost like a wizard. Then it would allow them to interact with that experience once they were inside. By doing that, you’re really reducing friction by helping them to not have to switch context back and forth. I think that’s a really good example of how you can help someone do something for themselves. So, Mike, how about another example from outside the industry?

Michael: There’s a project we did with Amazon with their digital device and customer support team and it involved a product feature called message us, where the goal was to deprecate the email channel that they had been using for support and create an omni-channel, text-based, self-help chat bot throughout all their apps and devices. For example, Prime Video, Kindle, Fire Tablets, amazon.com, et cetera, but branded specifically to that product or service. So imagine .com as the top of that funnel. And if a user goes there, then they will work their way down, select which product they would need help with. This chat bot also needed to support all those products and services and the different ingress points. If a user decided to come in, say through Amazon Prime, it needed to already advance the user down that funnel and to be smart in that way.

So again, as an example, a user types few key words and this chat bot responds with corresponding choices that eventually leads them to a self-help article on the web. And if that doesn’t actually solve their issue or their problem, then they had the option to speak to a live associate. So, think of this as a progressive help experience, if you will, that starts with self-service. And then again, if the issue isn’t solved, then you get to actually talk to a live person. An important piece of this functionality, as I mentioned at the beginning, was that this feature needed to be able to pick up the conversation where the user left off. So the whole omni-channel, multi-channel experience was really key in making sure again that it was on brand and seamless for all the products and services.

Craig: That’s a great example. Yeah. The last one that I was thinking about is the work that we did prior to our move into the healthcare focus with Mattress Firm. Mattress Firm is the largest mattress seller in the country. As we helped them fix their e-commerce experience to improve conversion and purchases, they asked a big question. They said, what’s the biggest reason someone wouldn’t buy a mattress online? Our team did some guerrilla research and found that the biggest reason was you wouldn’t know what it was like to sleep on it. We did some more studies, like I said, some gorilla research where we went into a store to physically go through the process of buying a mattress. We went online to their chat functionality, to interact with one of their customer care advocates or one of their insights sales people to see what questions they would ask. And we came up with an online mattress finder wizard that we were able to design and build and then test in an ad hoc manner. When we tested it, it actually increased conversions by over 50%.

So, if you think about that from a self-service perspective, it is looking at what the big problem is that’s holding someone back from being able to take action, and then trying to figure out how you can help that person take action in a way that’s intuitive and trustworthy. With this mattress finding wizard, through the data we gathered, we thought about the big questions that someone has. How do you sleep? Do you sleep on your side? Do you sleep on your back? Do you like a firm mattress, a soft mattress? How big? Is this for more than one person? Et cetera.

By doing that and walking through that flow, it ultimately dropped them into a product page that allowed them to make a easier decision. So, if you think about big decisions that you have to make, guiding someone through that process helps them to make those decisions a lot easier. So I think these examples are showing how self-service can work for pre-sale support as well as a educational perspective. It’s something that we’re passionate about and really excited about reducing friction for patients, members, customers, employees, and applying self-service where we can.

Moderator: Gentlemen, this was great. Thank you very much. And if you guys enjoyed this article, please subscribe to our newsletter. And if you enjoyed the video, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Thank you very much and have a great day.