Center For Improving Value in Health Care: A Design Sprint for Content Strategy
This is a story about a GV style design sprint. If you’ve never heard of that, you can learn more here or read the book.
The Center for Improving Value in Health Care (CIVHC) is a Colorado-based multi-stakeholder organization with a varied mission focused on improving quality and lowering the cost of health care in Colorado. They have several programs, the largest being the Colorado All-Payer Database. Like many organizations they found themselves managing three different legacy websites. They were embarking on a new program and would need to begin selling data and reporting new data to the public. It seemed like the time to review their content strategy and begin the process of simplifying.
CIVHC‘s talented 3-person marketing department had most of the skills and experience they needed to design a website and create content. They mostly needed help with content strategy, messaging, an outside perspective and experience designing health care data reports.
We’d been using the design sprint process with great results for positioning and for website design and we thought it would be the best way to help them clarify their content strategy and jumpstart the design.
Pre-Sprint: Content Inventory
In advance of our design sprint Jeff, Wowza’s creative director, and Will, our UI/UX designer, met with the CIVHC team to inventory all the content across three different legacy websites and talk with various content owners within the organization. We learned more about the organization goals as well as how the team worked together. Observation is an important part of design thinking and our site visit helped us understand the needs of the people we were working for.
The Team
Three members of the CIVHC team came in from Denver and joined Jeff and Will in Minneapolis: Cari, the marketing director, Rachel, a project manager and writer, and Stephanie, a graphic designer. Cari was our decider and Rachel facilitated. They stayed four days and flew back in time to conduct the Friday test from their Denver office.
A Valuable Insight
This was the first time we’d addressed a content strategy using the design sprint format. We typically follow the approach modeled on concepts captured in books like Content Strategy. These methodologies and frameworks are good, but we always felt like there was something missing. Coming from an advertising background, I always liked the creative team model where an art director and writer work together toward a concept. The design sprint proved to be a good way to leverage holistic creativity by including subject-matter expertise with creative and technical talents.
On Monday the team started by reviewing ideas generated from our content audit in Denver. There were several insights from that work but one stood out. It was Will who noticed that the team at CIVHC seemed to be overly critical of the work the organization was doing. CIVHC is a national leader in using health care data for system improvement and cost reduction. It seemed everyone else knew what great work they were doing, but they felt like they were falling short. Because we were outsiders, it was easy for us to recognize the importance of presenting their important programs with confidence and pride.
A Unifying Concept
It’s not uncommon for multi-stakeholder organizations like CIVHC to serve audiences with different needs and who understand information on different levels. It’s especially common in health care when communicating to professionals and consumers. To combine three websites and make all their programs clear to multiple audiences we wanted to have an overall concept that would contain all the content.
The sprint process proved again to be a good way to quickly generate and evaluate good ideas. What emerged from our various concepts was the idea that all the analysts, data scientists and program directors were on a mission to improve health care through data and we should feature them and their work. This would not only help people in Colorado understand what CIVHC did, it would build confidence within the organization. We summed up the idea in a hashtag phrase: On a #datamission to reduce cost and improve the quality of health care in Colorado.
The Prototype
The final website was going to have several paths for a variety of personas. We couldn’t prototype them all in a day, so we chose a consumer path. Part of the reason was practical; we could recruit consumers easily. The other reason was strategic. If consumers understand the information, then professionals would understand it even better.
We constructed the prototype in PowerPoint so it would be easy for anyone on the marketing team to work on it after the sprint.
The prototype wasn’t a complete content strategy by any means. There was still a lot of work left to do. But with a high fidelity representation of a consumer path and a unifying concept, the prototype made clear what the content needed to do in a way that everyone could understand the same way.
The Test
The CIVHC team conducted the test in their Denver office while we at Wowza watched via Google Hangout from Minneapolis. The technology is pretty amazing when you think about how costly and time consuming consumer research used to be not that long ago.
The subjects we found on Craigslist were great and every one of them understood what we were trying to communicate. Validating a prototype in a design sprint is not a test. The point isn’t to pass or fail but to learn. We learned a lot from our subjects and validated the effectiveness of our concept.
In the past a similar project would have dragged on for weeks or months and would have been tested on real people only after most of the time and budget had been exhausted.
