Patient Intake

Mysterious drop-off

Phreesia's patient intake website was designed to streamline the check-in process for medical appointments. Despite its intended convenience, the initial landing page experienced a significant drop-off rate, with many patients abandoning the process before taking any action. The reason for this high drop-off rate was unclear, posing a critical challenge for the team. Identifying and addressing the underlying issues was essential to improving the user experience and ensuring the website effectively served its purpose.

Identifying the cause

We needed to uncover why patients were leaving the page without completing the check-in process. This meant diving deep into user behavior, analyzing patterns, and seeking direct feedback from patients. Our goal was to pinpoint the exact moments of friction or confusion that caused users to abandon the process. Understanding these pain points was crucial to crafting a solution that addressed their needs effectively.

Continuous experiments

Over the course of eight months, I:

• Surveyed patients to understand their pain points with our current landing page
• Reviewed how competitors inside and outside the healthcare industry handled the first step of their check-in processes
• Planned for how to handle edge cases of various client configurations
• Ran three A/B tests: testing page layout, verbiage, and visual design elements
• Collaborated with various cross-functional teams, such as Product, Engineering, and Creative
• Iterated... A lot

For a more comprehensive explanation of each activity, check out my blog: Refining First Impressions

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Small adjustments

1. Streamlined layout: Simplified the design to focus on the most critical information, removing unnecessary elements that contributed to cognitive overload
2. Value proposition clarity: Rewrote the main headline and subheadings to clearly communicate the benefits of proceeding
3. Prominent CTA: Designed a larger, more visually distinct CTA button with compelling action-oriented text
4. Visual hierarchy: Implemented a clear visual hierarchy to guide the patient’s attention to the most important elements first

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Increased conversion

After several rounds of A/B testing and implementing the optimal design, we observed significant improvements:

1. Increased conversion rates: Conversion rates improved by 25%, resulting in about 2 million additional impressions on our partner’s advertisements
2. Positive user feedback: Patients reported a clearer understanding of the benefits and steps involved, feeling more confident to proceed

Next steps

• Ongoing monitoring: Continuously monitor user behavior to identify any new issues or areas for improvement
• Further optimization: Conduct periodic A/B tests to further refine the landing page and adapt to changing user needs
• Expand learnings: Apply the insights gained from this project to optimize other key pages within the product

Effective A/B tests

One of the most valuable lessons I learned during this project was the importance of deciding when to conduct an A/B test and when to rely on other research methods. Initially, we considered using A/B tests to add and remove elements on the page that we suspected were the cause of the drop-off. However, we soon realized that A/B testing would not provide the deep insights we needed to understand the root causes of the problem.

Instead, I learned that A/B testing is most effective when comparing two variations of a specific element to determine which performs better. It's a powerful tool for optimizing known issues or refining design choices. However, when the underlying reasons for user behavior are unclear, as they were in our case, qualitative research methods such as user interviews, usability testing, and heuristic evaluations are more appropriate. These approaches allowed us to gather rich, contextual insights directly from patients, revealing the pain points and frustrations that led to the drop-offs.