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THE DESIGN JOURNEY

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Harvard Catalyst Website Redesign

Summer 2016, I worked as a UX Research Intern at Harvard Medical School: Harvard Catalyst, for their website redesign project. It was definitely rewarding to be able to understand the importance of user research and market analysis before making design decisions.

 

Over the two months in Boston, I was able to conduct an extensive competitive analysis on the other 46 of 62 competing clinical & translational research institutions’ websites as well as collected and analyzed over 1,250 user survey results. The final competitive and user survey analysis reports and my design recommendation were presented to stakeholders and decision makers for them to plan the next steps of the redesign project.  

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Questions asked on the survey:

Anchor 1

In order to get in touch with the users—to understand what they think about the Harvard Catalyst's current website, our team administered a Qualtrics survey from June 20, 2016 until July 1, 2016. An invitation to participate in the survey was sent by e-mail to a total 12,706 users, who were either subscribers of the Newsletter or users of Harvard Catalyst tools such as Apply Hub, IRB Ceded Review Request system, Issue Maker, and Protocol Review. An incentive was provided to encourage participation.

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The objective of this survey was to gather information to provide Harvard Catalyst with a better understanding of the following:

  • Users’ demographics and current usage

  • Users’ behavior and motivation when visiting the website

  • Harvard Catalyst’s areas of strength and weakness

  • How users are using the website on mobile devices currently and if there is a need to improve on that aspect

Part 1: User Survey Analysis

Anchor 2

Due to the fact that the survey did not go through IRB review, the results cannot be published in any manner. However, some sample reuslting analysis graphs with fake data are presented below.

Identify User's Familiarity

  • Have you received/used any of the following Harvard Catalyst services? 

  • How often do you visit the Harvard Catalyst website?

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Identify Users’ Goal

  • When you visit the Harvard Catalyst website, what are you looking for?

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Identify Users’ Thoughts On Possible Implementation/Improvement to Current Site

  • Which of the following types of media would you like to see on the Harvard Catalyst website?

  • Which topics would you like to see covered in news, videos, and other multimedia on the Harvard Catalyst website?

  • Think big and strategic. If you were in charge of the Harvard Catalyst website, what would you do differently?

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Identify Users’ Priority - Indicate Importance Of Each Tool

  • How important are Harvard Catalyst tools are too you?

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Identify User's Smart Phone Usage - Mobile-Enablaed Questions

  • Do you own a smart phone?

  • For what percentage of your visits to the Harvard Catalyst website do you use a smart phone?

  • When using a smart phone, how easy or difficult is it to use the Harvard Catalyst website?

  • You previously indicated interest in the following aspects of the Harvard Catalyst website. How interested are you in using your smart phone to locate or complete each of the following?

  • Why don’t you visit the Harvard Catalyst website? 

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Identify User Background

  • What is your primary role/relationship with Harvard Medical School?

  • What is your primary institution?

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Identify User's Willingness to Further Testing

  • Would you be willing to participate in further research or speak with us further about the Harvard Catalyst website? 

Results & analysis of the survey:

Q: How important are Harvard Catalyst tools are too you?

Q: Think big and strategic. If you were in charge of the Harvard Catalyst website, what would you do differently?

 In order to analyze the results of this open-end question, I read through all of the users’ response, using an excel sheet, tag the responses with appropriate categories. For example, a comment such as

 

“I LOVE the current design, but I woud like to see more social media incorporation”

 

would be tag into categories “Current Site Is Great” and “Social Media Inorporation.” And in the end group common categories together to synthesize responses’ groups. I then sort these categories by the number of responses they have in order to determine what was most and least mention by the users. In some way, the analysis of this question is similar to card-sorting.

 For this Likert Scale question, I decided to visualize the data using 100% stacked bars by aggregating user reponses for each scale. I thought this was best to identify what tools are most important (largest greens) to users as well as what may need more publicity for users are highly unfamiliar with the tools (largest greys).

Part 2: Competitive Analysis

In order to understand competition--I conducted competitive analysis on the other similiar Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) organizations' websites, with the goals to identify the content and functionality at competing CTSA websites, both to inform the redesign and to better understand areas of competitive advantage.

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Purpose and Goals

The primary purpose of this competitive analysis was to assess the usability, content, and structure of other CTSA websites in order gain insights into where Harvard Catalyst stands in terms of competitive advantage or disadvantage. The secondary purpose was to use such data to provide recommendations for the redesign of Harvard Catalyst’s website.

In particular, with such purposes in mind, the specific goals of the analysis were:

  • How do other CTSAs tell users what services/programs they offer? (Wording, graphics, etc.) 

  • Information architecture of other CTSA websites (e.g. Organization and naming of content, menu structure, navigation flow, etc.) 

  • Unique features of other CTSA websites

  • Do other CTSA websites utilize interesting methods for visualizing information and, if yes, what kind of information do they highlight? (E.g. # of clinical trials per institution)

  • Are other CTSA websites generally behind login or publicly available

  • Are other CTSA websites mobile-friendly, and if so, how are they doing it?

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Methodology

 Competitors Overview

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Due to the time-sensitive nature of the project, a total of 46 out of 62 competing CTSAs’ websites was selected and analyzed. The priority and number of the selected schools are listed as follows:

  • Boston region (5): we analyzed the institutions that are in the same region as Harvard Catalyst to give us insight into local efforts.

  • Closest competitor (1): based on their similar size and scope to Harvard Catalyst, we recognized UCSF as Harvard Catalyst’s closest competitor and hence want to ensure it was taken into account in the analysis.

  • Additional research centers (40): we then tried to analyze as many of the rest as possible given the time frame.

  1. Competing websites focus on information delivery rather than website appearance

  2. Public-facing materials such as news & events, ongoing research, and accomplishments are highly emphasized at competing websites

  3. While a subset of the competing websites are mobile-friendly, it is not executed well

  4. Audience-specific approaches taken by the competitors to build a separate website for different user roles; these include content oriented to researchers and content oriented to community members or volunteers.

 

Examining the wide variety of website functionality that is offered by the competitors also raises a number of possibilities for the redesigned website. Notable among that functionality was:

  • Membership program

  • Infographics (graphical displays of statistics such as number of trials)

  • Separate public-facing/researcher-facing sites

  • More graphics or programs showing and engaging the community

Detailed overall insights of the analysis in a question-answer format as well as more information on redesign recommendations are documented in the full report.

Major Findings

A list of the CTSAs were obtained from the CTSA central website. Given the time-sensitive nature of the project, a subset of the sites was evaluated. A list of questions was created for reviewing each website and the result data was collected in a Google form that can be accessed here.

A Google form was chosen as the method of collecting data because:

  • Google form has built in equations that produce visualization for raw data (i.e. pie charts, raw data analysis) once data is all collected

  • Collected data is automatically organized in a clean excel sheet for optimal analysis

  • Another person can easily replicate the procedures and continue future analysis

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Part 3: Infographics & Agile

Besides the main big website redeisgn project, I was also involved in other smaller projects. I volunteered to design a new info-graphics for the organization to better visualize what products they offer:

I was also able to learn and observe agile practices this summer at Harvard Catalyst, as their informatics team is in the process of honing our agile process. It was amazing to learn more about interdisciplinary team collaboration and product iterations as well as challenges that may occur during the transformation process.

Note: Not actual data 

Note: Not actual data 

Note: Not actual data 

Part 4: End of internship!

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