Intro
Ubuntu Beds is a non-profit initiative set up in response to Covid-19. Their aim is to unite empty hospitality businesses and healthcare workers who are fighting on the front-line. Through various types of funding, they provide free accommodation to our healthcare heroes in need of quarantine, isolation and home away from home facilities. I was asked to join the project to lead the design & implementation of a Whatsapp chatbot and to improve the overall healthcare worker experience, paying specific attention to improving the signup and donation processes.
Role
I was the lead UX designer, working with a junior designer who I mentored throughout the project and a senior Product Designer who I brought on to assist with the initial heuristic evaluation. Besides working closely with the key stakeholders and the technical lead within the business, I collaborated with Clickatell who developed the Whatsapp API integration.
Tasks
The problem
Improve the overall booking experience while removing the barriers to entry for low-income, rural healthcare workers.
Strategy
I was provided with a clear objective to increase rural, low-income healthcare worker signups by creating WhatsApp chatbot and improving the overall web experience. In order to better understand the problem and to validate it, I conducted stakeholder interviews with project leads for each department.
I also did a tech stack analysis to understand the possibilities and constraints I had to work within, one of the key constraints being the CMS, Squarespace, which had it’s design limitations.
Discovery
With Ubuntu Beds being a customer-centric business, I was fortunate enough to have both qualitative and quantitative data at my disposal when I started. Not only were personas already created, but there was also data from user interviews and the analytics tools already setup for me to analyze.
I wanted to validate assumptions made by the business though, so I also setup Hotjar and Google Optimize so we could dive deeper into the user interactions and behaviors.
Not wanting to miss the finer nuances or pain points, with the help of a team, we did a short, timeboxed heuristic evaluation of the platform and then prioritized the usability issues accordingly.
Analysis
In order to better empathize with the personas, I created storyboards of the possible scenarios of signing up.
From analyzing the data on hand and the storyboards, I defined the user motivations and their emotional states when signing up, this would be the bases for my decision making.
Under these difficult circumstances, users were under emotional distress and were either wanting to signup to isolate or to protect their loved ones. Due to this, the process needed to be as frictionless and intuitive as possible and had to take into account technology limitations and language barriers.
Design
The high-level objectives for the WhatsApp and web signups were the same but they would be coming from different channels with their own unique limitations. Due to this, they were designed separately but in parallel to one another to ensure the objectives still aligned.
High-level flows were sketched out for both user journeys and iterated upon while taking into account design and technical limitations. A common problem between both user journeys was that the application length needed to be shortened, so required fields were prioritized against objectives taking user personas into account.
In my initial analysis, I also identified a lack of context to the service offering and so I added this into the user journey as a priming mechanism.
Test
Through Google Tag Manager, I setup click tracking events on all major components so we could track the user flow and where dropoffs were happening. I also setup Google Analytics goals to measure the conversion rates of users submitting signup forms.
For unmoderated testing in it’s purest form, I used Hotjar. Initially, the forms were integrated through iframes which prevented us from Hotjar video tracking but luckily the change in integration was easy, allowing me to record all signup interactions.
The outcome
The UX measurement metrics are still currently in progress but I decreased the length of the signup process by 36% for Covid positive patients and 21% for Home away from home patients.
Due to the urgency and nature of this project and the pandemic I had to put my “design ego” aside and prioritize the necessities for achieving the business objectives within its constraints.
The WhatsApp chatbot is still currently under development and I am excited to share the outcome once it’s out of UAT.