Faceted Search: finding the right doctor

Getting visitors to make appointments is a primary business objective, and the physician profiles are among the most heavily trafficked areas of the site. Survey comments said it was hard to find the right provider. The search already had faceted filtering, but the controls didn't stand out enough for users to notice them or understand how to use them. The question wasn't whether facets should exist. It was how they should work.

Testing was a new step in this environment, so I made the case for it and got approval from my manager. I defined the scenarios and questions, designed two competing approaches (open and closed facets), built the prototype, and set the test methodology. A third party ran the sessions using my designs and protocol. I then reviewed the findings with my manager, agreed on a direction, and presented the results to the director and senior director.

From testing to the live site

Faceted search was implemented in the physician profiles search after testing. Because appointments are completed in MyChart, the website can't see the full conversion path, so I tracked success partly through user comments about difficulty finding providers.

What I contributed: research strategy, scenarios, prototype, test design and protocol, analysis, iteration, and experience recommendations.

Wayfinding on a 15,000-page site

On a site with roughly 15,000 live pages, users could move between sections through navigation, links, and callouts without realizing where they had landed. Site-survey data showed that orientation was affecting satisfaction at scale.

I combined survey comments, recorded sessions, previous/next-page analytics, and navigation scores to find patterns. Two root causes emerged: users lacked persistent indicators of where they were, and navigation exposed only two levels even when the underlying hierarchy was much deeper.

I then designed and tested tasks around knowing where you are, navigating to a destination, and recovering from an orientation problem. The resulting direction introduced persistent sub-site headers and more focused section-level navigation, giving visitors a stronger sense of place without adding visual complexity.

What I contributed: research synthesis, problem definition, task design, prototype direction, testing, and information architecture.

Personas built from a year of survey data

For hopkinsmedicine.org, I analyzed a full year of mobile and desktop survey data to identify the primary visitor segments, their tasks, their expectations, and the environment they were in. The personas combine user, task, and environmental profiles instead of relying on demographics alone.

The goal was practical: give teams a shared reference point for design decisions based on probable user behavior rather than stakeholder assumptions.