On Site Location/Orientation (Johns Hopkins Medicine)

Hopkinsmedicine.org has about 15 thousand live pages at any given time, and users can quickly become disoriented about their place in the site. When browsing content, clicking through menus, and especially in-page text links, visitors can find themselves switching sections without knowing it.

Planning

What

Determine what is causing orientation issues and create solutions to provide a better understanding of where one is on the site.

Key Performance Indicators

Successful solutions will result in:

  1. A reduction in survey comments related to a lack of orientation on the site.

  2. An increase in high scores and/or a decrease in low scores on navigational element questions from ForeSee site survey participants.

  3. An increase in overall satisfaction scores from ForeSee site survey participants.

Why

From the ForeSee site survey:

  • Too many site visitors are leaving negative comments about their orientation on the site.

  • Based on the ForeSee’s predictive modeling, navigation is a priority element on which to focus our work, and increases in lower scoring elements can have a larger impact on overall satisfaction scores.

Related company goals

  • A goal of Johns Hopkins Medicine’s Strategic Plan is to, “Make Johns Hopkins Medicine easy.”

  • Site survey scores are used as one of the metrics to determine the general success of the website. Increasing navigation scores will increase the overall satisfaction scores of the website.

Research goals

  • What is causing visitors to become lost on the site, prompting them to leave negative comments about this?

  • What is causing low navigational element scores, particularly:

    • Ease of finding what they’re looking for

    • Page layout’s ability to display content and links where you could find them

    • Links taking you where you expected to go

Anticipated outcomes/Hypotheses

Through the study we’ll categorize comments with associated satisfaction scores to show the severity of dissatisfaction per category, and  lists of problematic page components with potential solutions. 

Method

Over a one-month period, use site survey, recorded site sessions, and previous/next page analytics to determine what is causing orientation issues.

  1. Count and categorize negative comments referring to lack of orientation.

  2. Break down occurrences of low navigation scores by section to determine which recorded sessions to review.

    1. Review sessions and create observation notes, particularly looking for obvious issues, or patterns of issues.

    2. Review page paths from the sections with low scores looking for evidence that users are lost.

      1. Potential evidence of orientation issues includes:

        1. Back and forth navigation between the same pages

        2. Large jumps in the site tree, especially out of a particular specialization, disease, or treatment section

        3. Repeated use of the search application, especially with the same, or similar, queries

  3. Benchmark overall satisfaction scores from ForeSee site survey participants for comparison against solutions.

Findings

Findings by review method:

  1. Dozens of comments over the month-long period related to orientation issues.

  2. Low navigation scores were relatively equal across site sections (within 1 CSAT point), so the sections with the most traffic were used to determine which recorded sessions to watch.

Summary:

Survey responses and video reviews of site sessions revealed two main issues contributing to difficulty in way-finding and lack of orientation within the site at large:

  • No ever-present sub-site (section) markers on page

  • Deep menu structures indicating only two levels at a time despite allowing much deeper access

Prototype Testing

  • Create template header and menu prototype(s) for usability testing.

  • Use unmoderated task completion tests through the Vision Critical testing platform.

    • All participants on this platform are current or former Hopkins Medicine health system patients

  • Create a series of testing tasks designed to identify if users:

    • Know where they are in the site

    • Can get to a predetermined location in the site

    • Can describe how they would go about solving orientation issues when they arise

  • Analyze the results noting:

    • Negative and positive orientation comments

    • First click selections and use of back button to make alternate choices

    • Time taken to complete tasks, or incomplete tasks

Outcomes

To give visitors persistent orientation, a site header was developed representing sub-sites containing an optional parent institution title, sub-site title, and sub-site menu. A sub-site is any website nested under the hopkinsmedicine.org domain. Root-level sub-sites present their own headers. Smaller sites within a sub-sites present their own header including a link to the parent sub-site.

To combat deep menu structures, the sub-sites were given their own menus, limited to pages within the section. All pages within that sub-site would be accessible from the main sub-site menu or through a combination of lower-level, nested menus and page-level callouts. The page-level callouts would be most used on landing pages to access key content, deeper pages, or sections that do not appear in menus.