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Optimising Benenden Health's core proposition pages

After a year's worth of experimentation, I led a redesign of Benenden's core healthcare pages to a 15% uplift in conversion.

Benenden Health new healthcare pages

The challenge

All traffic, no leads

Not-for-profit healthcare provider Benenden Health were pushing themselves with a stretch target of increased yearly leads. They were getting a lot of traffic from TV campaigns, but this traffic wasn't necessarily converting into leads.

I conducted an expert review which showed there were numerous usability and accessibility issues that could be addressed, but after the CRO team ran some surveys on the site it also became clear that people were struggling to understand Benenden's core proposition.

A slide showing a mobile screenshot with negative critiques
A slide addressing some poor tabs-related usability from the expert review report I wrote

Incremental test and learn

Over a year, I worked closely with our data analyst and optimisation specialist to design A/B tests across the B2C journey looking to improve areas on the form, but also to grow our understanding of what information and to what level was important to users, for example around the inclusions of the healthcare product.

Healthcare redesign

In January 2020, we launched an A/B test changing the entire B2C healthcare section of the Benenden Health site. This was a multi-hypothesis test and the culmination of a year’s worth of research and experimentation where we gained a lot of insight into a user’s understanding of Benenden and the type of information they were looking for. We had observed:

  • people struggle to understand the proposition and what was included
  • usability issues across the site
  • a positive effect from implementing a clearer layout on the B2B healthcare pages

Approach

I co-facilitated a co-design content workshop with the client, where as a group we used our insight and their subject matter expertise to start laying out content in a better hierarchy. I took this into production of a mid-fidelity prototype for lab research. I designed the prototype in Sketch, then built it into VWO (our A/B testing tool) so the prototype loaded directly into the site giving users a seamless experience if they visited pages not directly in our test.

I observed, took notes in a matrix and analysed the results of testing to take into a second interation we'd test quantatively on-site.

Screenshot of Benenden's B2C homepage
The original healthcare homepage
A prototype of a new healthcare homepage
Medium fidelity content prototype of the healthcare homepage

Round two

In the usability testing, I tried to keep existing components from the current site as our client's tech team had quite a large backlog and we were conscious of creating work that wouldn't be built. However, after testing it was clear to me this just wasn’t going to work. There were fundamental issues with lots of their existing components and we now had usability testing insight to back that up, we needed to make bigger changes if we wanted to get the big results we knew we could get.

Benenden Healthcare prototype
The new B2C healthcare homepage (screenshot of live test)
Benenden Healthcare prototype test
Mobile view (earlier screenshot)

I designed and built a second iteration, this time in high-fidelity. I addressed multiple UX issues, but also focused on improving the visual design:

  • removed the hard-to-read and forced uppercase font used in the hero and swapping to their core headings font for better legibility
  • created better hierarchy for button usage, with the solid pink used for primary CTAs and the inverse for secondary buttons
  • curved image in the hero for better brand alignment

We chose to quantitatively test on-site, so I built the new design into VWO test updated versions of all 5 pages against their original control pages.

Services section of Benenden health page using iconography
Bottom of Benenden healthcare page using different background colours to bring out a join us banner, and two contact related blocks

Results

The proof is in the metrics

The big test paid off. Online join conversions improved by 15.2%, with a whopping 23.1% increase on mobile. This worked out at 471 additional joins per month.

I created a prioritised actions list for the client to take away so when implementing changes they could start with the most impactful first.

After this, our client also asked us to do a small art direction piece and produce a style guide for the website.