CHALLENGE:

Discover ways to improve the public website and member portal, to ensure a high-level of usability.

SOLUTION:

Findings & Recommendations for overal UI improvement.

METHODS: Usability review | Think-aloud usability testing

TOOLS: Sketch | Axure | Keynote

The Lighthouse Circle is a non-profit organization whose mission and vision is to help those who have been diagnosed with a life-altering illness to both share their journey, and find support in a community facing similar challenges. They provide a website and member portal that allows users to connect with each other, log their journey, recommend, rate and share information on treatments, providers, articles and other helpful information. Lighthouse Circle hopes to leverage the information that users publicly provide to improve treatments and find cures; with the belief that the journey of one has the potential to affect the journey of many more to come.

Some of the key areas they wanted visibility to:

• Does the website communicate the value of Lighthouse Circle and their offerings?

• Does it encourage individuals and supporters to join the Lighthouse community via the website? 

• Does it facilitate connections between individuals with shared experiences within the portal?

• Can users:

  • Create and edit a journal entry (including articles, treatments, appointments, diagnoses)

  • Search for other users 

  • View another user’s journal entries

  • Add, rate and favorite a provider

Approach

The first step in learning about the level of usability present on the public site and the portal was to perform a heuristic analysis, which is an informal usability inspection method that asks evaluators to assess an interface against a set of agreed-upon best-practices.

In addition to this, a total of 12 participant evaluations were conducted: 8 remote & 4 in-person, all of whom had experienced a life-altering medical diagnosis, or had a family member who has.

Below are some of things we asked of our participants: 

• Access the public site for The Lighthouse Circle, and then the portal. 

• Feedback on the aesthetic appeal of the site, what they thought the purpose of the site was, what they could do on it, and their general feelings or impressions of it. 

• Tasked to try to join, and then find people with the same diagnosis. 

• Try to record a journal entry about their sleep, find a specific user in the portal, and rate a Provider. 

• Any additional feedback they had about the site. 

View test plan here

Findings

Within the first few minutes of viewing the The Lighthouse Circle webesite, nearly all of our participants noted the calming blue color scheme, the beautiful photographs, and the clean look of the site. After more browsing, most began to surmise this was a non-profit, offering some type of support for people dealing with health issues. However, there were several pain points discovered.

On the public website, we found:

• Participants did not immediately understand the meaning of “Harbor” in this context. Beacon and Lanterns were also not understood if they did not fully scroll down the home page 

• The Your Path From Diagnosis page seemed like a place you would go to learn more about next steps and joining, however there is no actionable content on the page.

• How & Why to Join: Many participants noted that they wanted to know more about the organization (i.e.: history, who is behind it, etc.). Also, the exact benefits to them were not fully explained on the Home page.

  Within the portal, we discovered:

• Search Bar: This was a pain point for almost all participants. Names did not come up unless they were spelled correctly.

• Some users went to the Sort/Filter button after the first failed attempt and selected “all” which helped in the search but was frustrating. 

• It is not apparent the small ‘visited’ icon needs to be selected in order to rate a Provider. This caused frustration when a user can see the tile for the provider they want to rate, but then cannot click on any stars to rate.

• The Connections in the Portal and the MyConnections in the Profile were confusing to users, and they didn’t know the difference.

  Regarding overall UI, we heard:

• Users noted the difference in the aesthetic
  between the website end the portal. Some wondered if they were on the same site. 

• There was confusion noted by users about where to enter a Journal entry and where to enter an event on the Timeline. The Journal and Timeline in the portal need to be either labeled. 

Recommendations & Prototype

Opportunities for enhancements on the website:

• Revamp the page to have more information and links within the site to resources for a newly diagnosed person.

• Reduce the size of the photo to accommodate the added content.

• Explain the meaning of a “harbor” in the text, and possibly of Beacon, Lantern and Providers again.

• Consider moving the All Harbors tab from the main navigation to the navigation of Your Path page. The dropdown of diseases will make sense with the written explanation on this page.

• Write a clear invitation and create link to join Lighthouse Circle. Reiterate the reasons joining is beneficial.

Opportunities for enhancements on the portal:

• Use predictive text to aid search for users.

• Remove the dependency on selecting the sort/filter button first.

• Provider ratings, this could be explained in a tutorial or Help section, or simply above the tiles to guide the user.

• Create a hover over the Connections button that states,“make new connections”, or it could be explained in a tutorial.
  
  

View Full Findings & Recommendations Report

Conclusion & Next Steps

Although we found several opportunities for improvement, the overall impression of The Lighthouse Circle is that the fundamental premise of the organization and the sites (both public and the portal) is a very positive, supportive and useful one. In fact, almost all participants felt the color scheme, photos, Mission & Vision conveyed a sense of calm, understanding and hope. One of the participants we interviewed, who is a nurse, said: “I really hope this site helps some people.”

It’s our team’s belief that with a few key improvements, The Lighthouse Circle can make a meaningful impact in the lives of those dealing with life-altering illnesses.