First phase of redesign digital landscap of LUMC
Problem to solve
Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) wants to position themselves as a knowledge institute where patient care, research and education come together. This is based on their new strategy that was just launched by the board. At the moment, this strategy is suboptimal visible throughout their digital landscape, especially their primary portal, the public website. No clear content strategy is used or a distinction in content or functionality is made for their target users. The digital landscape is also complex and scattered and has no identical branding. To offer a good service to all stakeholders, LUMC asked for a redesign of their entire digital landscape. With the public website as a starting point. The redesign will affect a lot of stakeholders, from doctors to researchers to educators, to internal departments like marketing and patients. For LUMC as a business a better position and information provision will lead to more subsidies, more and better employees and satisfied customers. For users (like: visitors, patients, (potential) researchers, (potential) students) it will be easier to navigate through the website to find relevant information. IDEAN was chosen to be LUMC‘s design partner. The starting point for this agile project is a webresearch to gather the necessary insights before we start with ideation, prototyping and eventually implementation of the redesign. Together with another Service designer, UX designer and a strategy consultant, we conducted this webresearch to gather insights for a useful foundation for the redesign of the public website. For this research, we got help from the Marketing-Communication team of LUMC. The question LUMC asked Idean: Can you help with redesigning our digital landscape so it will align with our new strategy to be the knowledge institute where patient care, research and education comes together?
What I did
Kick-off
We organised the kick-off, together with the marketing-communication team of LUMC, to decide on the scope of the project, set the right expectations, discuss the approach, deliverable and the timings.
Discovery (research & analysis)
In depth interviews
We started of with in-depth interviews with our main stakeholders within the 3 core parts of LUMC; patient care, research and education. To make sure we were interviewing the right stakeholders, a stakeholder map was created.
Together with my colleagues we were conducting the interviews with stakeholders that have an interest in LUMC‘s public website. Each interview was done by the two of us, so one could ask the questions and the other could make notes. We wanted to really understand what the stakeholders think of the current public website, their pains and gains, but also what their needs/wishes are for the redesign, their comforts and anxieties.
Desk research, Exert reviews & Service Blueprint
Next to the interviews, I created a service blueprint and took a deepening in the desk research and expert reviews, for which I did a benchmark with national and international University Medical Centers.
Workshop facilitation
During the project we facilitated multiple workshops with the marketing-communication team to discuss our progress and the insights we gathered. Some of the workshops and focus sessions were with specific stakeholders for deep diving into the field.
Persona & Customer journey creation
Together with the team and the Marketing-Communication team of LUMC, we transformed the 22 predefined usergroups to 4 primary personas and 8 secondary personas. We did this by looking at the users‘ needs when using the public website. For the users who had the same needs, one persona was created. In all cases we took the persona in the most complex form. As an example for education: we have the international student and the national student. In this case we choose to create one persona, but took the international as an example because it will cover also everything the national persona needs.
For these primary personas a customer journey was created to get better insights in the touching points with the public website.
Content analysis, image check & design principles
In this phase, i also assisted with the content analysis and the image check to determine the value proposition of the website and set up the design principles that reflect the necessary needs of all the personas. These principles will be used during ideation and eventually for designing.
Functional framework (high over requirements)
At the end of the phase, I converted all the gathered insights to a functional framework (requirements) and a list of wishes for the redesign. Based on a bundle of factors, the requirements were prioritised.
Advisory and Next steps
Based on all the insights, an advisory report for the redesign of the public website was written for the steering group. Part of the advisory report were the sketches we made that showed possible visible solutions for important insights we gathered.
The advisory report was presented to the steering group, from which we discussed the next steps for the service design trajectory.
Impact & Learnings
The deliverable for this webresearch was an advice on the current status and best way forward. The steering group had really high expectations. Since we involved them along the way, some of the outcomes were still an unpleasant surprise. It took time to delve in. A learning for me in this project is stakeholder management and involving not only the party that ‘hired’ us, but especially the persons who decide on the next steps of the project. In this case the steering group. The marketing-communication team insisted that they were the ones updating the steering group, without the interference of Idean. However, for next time, it was better that we were involved during their updates, to give further explanation when necessary.
