NHS Digital
Leading user research for NHS Digital Campaigns working on Change4Life transformation strategy to Better Health.
Transformation of Change4Life for NHS Digital Campaigns
Within the Campaigns team I worked as their sole User Researcher on the discovery and release phases of the transition of the Change4Life brand to Better Health. This involved using a mixture of quant and qual methods to gather research and understand the user needs.
Discovery
When I arrived in the team the Change4Life website had been running since 2009 and there was a need within the organisation to update it and bring it in line with the Better Health brand, but also align it with the NHS design system.
At that point the team was aware that there was very little understanding about users, research hadn’t been conducted on the website for a long time and in order to effectively move the brand over to Better Health all of this needed to be defined.
So I spent some time conducting discovery research to understand who Change4Life users were, how they used the website and why it was important to them.
To do this I conducted a survey on HotJar which got over 500 responses, I gathered analytics from the Data & Insight team, and I conducted qual user research and testing with 12 participants - new users and existing users.
The key thing we learnt was that Change4Life had a strong passionate following and that there were aspects of it that were incredibly important to users. People would use it every day as their key source for healthy eating and recipes. They also found it very useful for their kids to live healthy and understand nutrition.
Further research to understand gaps
Once we had conducted the first round of the Discovery phase research the team was armed with a lot of insight into how to move forward with the rebuild of the website. However, we felt there were some gaps in our knowledge that we wanted to supplement to understand further.
We wanted to better understand how users navigate the Food Facts section of the website and how they understand the language on the site - whether this needed to be updated or whether it was relatable to them.
So I conducted further quant and qual analysis of the Food Facts section of the website using mixed methods.
I also ran a card sort exercise to understand how users were experiencing the language.
What I discovered from both tests was that users really wanted the information to be displayed in a different context, across the different sections of the website so that they could see nutritional information, or exercise information alongside recipes.
‘Healthier Families’ Further testing
Taking the learning from the discovery phase, the development team started to design and build the new version of Change4Life, which was to be called ‘Better Health: Healthier Families.’
There were a number of things we needed to do to ensure that the new design would work with users. We also needed to steer the stakeholders away from calling the website just ‘Better Health,’ because that website already existed.
I conducted three more rounds of testing with the new design, before the launch of the product. This included a brand name test.
Working with the multi disciplinary team on the MVP build
The team’s aim was to deliver an MVP version of Better Health - Healthier Families within 3 months of the discovery phase.
There were many things that needed to be compromised for the first release. My job was to ensure that the high priority things from the research were listened to, with the release of the first MVP version.
I worked closely with the product, design, content and development teams, on the information architecture and build of the pages ahead of the release.
