Fixing a prominent government health website

Problems: Healthfinder.gov is an evidence-based health website that reaches 10 million people annually — but users were navigating away from the site almost immediately — in part because:

• A Health Topics A to Z section was prominently featured in the top navigation which actually contained a library of external links

• The health topics that were written and reviewed on the site were getting minimal traffic because of poor page labeling and location (within 2 levels deep on the information architecture)

Solutions: Initiated an information architecture (IA) redesign which included:

• Conducting card sorting with users and usability testing

• Restructuring the IA

• Relabeling pages

• Decluttering the homepage and leveraging search

• Developing a widget to guide members to tailored health topics based on age, sex, pregnancy status, smoking status

Impact

• 35% reduction in bounce rate after IA redesign 

• Increased traffic to pages and increased the time that people spent on those pages 2 fold due to UX updates

• The widget was written about in American Medical Association journal and was added to over 100 websites after launch including the CVS minute clinic

• More than these metrics, it changed the user experience: before the redesign users couldn’t complete tasks in usability testing, but after the redesign they were able to and navigate to content and engage with it, leading to their questions being answered