Health | Portfolio

H e a l t h . g o v

A c c e s s i b l e w e b p a g e r e d e s i g n

A u s t r a l i a n D e p a r t m e n t o f H e a l t h

The Department of Health is a department of the Government of Australia charged with overseeing Australia's health system that is administered by State and territory governments. It supports universal and affordable access to medical, pharmaceutical and hospital services, as well as helping people to stay healthy through health promotion, participation and exercise and other disease prevention activities.

Through this webpage, many Australian’s access all they need to know about a variety of health topics and information, making this website a crucial tool for people’s health knowledge requirements

Through this case study, we endeavour to gain insight into the needs, difficulties and desires of the users by conducting thorough research.

Using the knowledge gained through research, we will re design the Australian Department of Health webpage to ensure it’s ease of usability, access of information and increase its visual aesthetic

This will be done by ensuring we implement user testing and input at every stage of the design process when considering design and functionality

The G o a l

To successfully redesign the Australian Government Health website to enable better user efficiency, usability and accessibility using in depth analysis and research and implementing UX/UI methods

Role

Throughout this process, I worked on all phases of design and development. This included research, testing, design and prototyping. We had a three week timeframe for this webpage redesign

M e e t L u c y

Creating a proto persona allowed us to gain insight of what users might be struggling with and what goals they had in regards to health information

U n d e r s t a n d i n g t h e P r o b l e m

The Australian Department of Health webpage was designed to achieve public access of health related information within Australia. We observed that users of the website were struggling with ease of access to information when visiting the webpage which was leading to frustration and less use of the site. How might we improve the functionality of the government health website to ensure that users are not only comfortable using it, but also able to access desired information within the website?

U s e r P a t h

Understanding how users move through a website is vital in understanding their motivations. Using a user path we plotted how a user would be travelling through the current webpage to inform us of the necessary actions required to complete a task

U s e r T e s t i n g P l a n

We gave our user’s some task to complete to see how they were able to navigate the website

Find the Mental Health & Suicide Prevention page

Find a crisis support service for mental health support

Find information about financial support available for mental health treatment

U s a b i l i t y T e s t i n g

The User test revealed some insightful points of contention with our users while using the current website. This information would help in directing us where we would need to improve the usability and navigation of the webpage. It also lead us to understand user pain points and how efficiently they were using the site.

Expected more information on eligibility within "Better Help Initiative"

Hard to navigate as was now on the "Head to Health" website

Finds a few options for a phone line

Felt unsure because it said "helping Australians" and she isn't Australian

"Better Health initiative" wasn't very clear

Unable to locate information about what she is entitled to

P a i n P o i n t s & F r e q u e n c y o f R e s p o n s e

Synthesizing the usability testing results, some common threads began to appear

"Better Access initiative" wasn't very clear
Did not know "Better Access Initiative" was related to financial support
Finding financial support is very confusing
Frustrated when navigating after being directed to the external "Head to Health" website
Found info on gov websites to be rather vague (not sure if this health.gov.au)
Felt unsure because it said "Helping Australians" - what about non Australian citizens?
Expected more information on eligibility within "Better Access Initiative"
Separating the crisis support contacts with the other mental health support contacts
Unable to locate information about what the user is entitled to
Would prefer an obvious way to access the crisis support contacts on the Mental Health & Suicide Prevention Contacts Page
The appearance of the "Crisis support contacts" link seems less obvious to the user
"Better Access Initiative" page has a lot of text and could be presented better
Is it supposed to mention mental health on the homepage?

P r i o r i t i z a t i o n

Prioritizing the results to get a visual aid to show what is most important to the stakeholders and users

R e d e s i g n i n g t h e S i t e m a p

Redesigning the sitemap would give us some insight into how our redesign would need to work and where the nest place for information would be. After a round of card sorting, we were ready to build a new site map

Wireframing

Our initial wireframes depicted how we might start to redesign the the user flow and access of information on the site based on our usability testing and previous research

S t y l e G u i d e

Keeping the websites aesthetics clean and consistent was a crucial part of our design process as it enable users to feel comfortable with the website and able to familiarize themselves with the functionality. Using a design system we created set colour palettes, button states, iconography and graphic imagery that would ensure we kept consistency in our prototyping

F i n a l P r o d u c t

Through thorough iterations and user testing, and applying our style guide, the final prototype was designed using Figma