Guy's & St Thomas' NHS Trust
Serving over 2.5 million patients and following a hospital merger, GSTT sought a new public platform to reflect the Trust and balance diverse stakeholder needs.
Hospitals
Annual site visitors
Patients engaged with during discovery
The ask
Guy's & St Thomas's NHS Trust (GSTT) had a keen focus on delivering a platform that would meet the needs of patients, carers, families, and medical professionals, all with a need to access pivotal trust information. Accessibility and usability were therefore key, understanding that users were often accessing the platform in times of distress.
The approach
Discovery
Throughout Discovery, our team engaged with over 770 users from across the GSTT ecosystem, these included patients, carers, parents, medical professionals and wider staff within the Trust, all using the platform for a bespoke set of needs. This included a focus on users with assistive needs, including both cognitive and physical disabilities to ensure the content structure, visual design and information presented on the platform would be clear and easy to use for all users.
User engagement involved surveys to capture a wide GSTT audience, tree testing and card sorting activities to understand the effectiveness of the information architecture, and 1-2-1 user testing to really uncover the user experience. Our team also took a holistic view at the performance of the site in general, considering insights from Google Analytics implementation to inform our approach to user engagement. This resulted in the production of the Discovery report, sharing our methodology and approach, as well as recommendations to inform the subsequent phase of the project.
Design
Building on the outputs of Discovery, the solution design phase continued our engagement with GSTT users. Through 1-2-1 user testing, each design prototype increased in fidelity with each iteration of feedback from users and GSTT stakeholders. This resulted in hi-fi clickable prototypes that would be easily translated into development through leveraging Storybook as our front end library of choice.
Throughout 1-2-1 testing, GSTT team members were invited to participate as passive observers in the testing process. This provided GSTT with a first hand experience of the user testing process, as well as direct insight into the user experience.
Intuitive search
Leveraging Apache Solr, the GSTT search experience includes autocomplete and synonym support to support users when searching for complex medical terms, e.g. a search for ‘heart’ would yield ‘cardiology’ results. With several hospitals operating under one Trust, the GSTT team also have the ability to hide or exclude certain results under certain search terms, ensuring the user doesn’t see conflicting results for different hospitals.
Furthermore, with a broad range of information on the GSTT site, allowing the search functionality to offer results within files improved the speed and accuracy of results.
Accessible resources
Custom functionality has also included the ability for GSTT users to print pages or resources in adaptive styles that are automatically optimised for print. This includes the ability to combine pages into a single document as a ‘print this resource’ functionality, allowing users to easily access and use crucial information.
Ease of content management
Drupal facilitates a WYSIWYG editor interface and supports flexible, yet centralised, content management. Furthermore, due to the large range of complex content available on the platform ‘search and replace’ has been developed for the GSTT editor team to easily update terminology that may be used on multiple pages. This has ultimately reduced the time spent in manually updating content.
The results
The GSTT platform is now fully accessible to WCAG2.2 standards, as verified by 3rd party audit to 2.1 standards that were applicable at the time.
This has resulted in an award winning platform, with GSTT placing 1st at the Web Excellence awards for Accessibility in Healthcare.
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There was strong communication between developers, project manager and GSTT, and the thorough user research and content architecture made building a back end really easy. It was great to have access to Figma which made the design process clear and was great to see how everything was being put together Guy's & St Thomas NHS Trust
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