Finding business and user harmony on EES's first mobile site

Collective Health were in the process of making sure all their content and services fully support native Spanish speakers. This is no small undertaking considering the variables in an end-to-end healthcare experience.

For these reasons, with open-enrolment and the new year fast approaching, we set to work creating a brand new content experience just for Spanish speakers. Along with a small, but mighty team, I designed a Spanish language companion site.

Approach

In order to make sure we serve our users correctly, myself and our lead Spanish Content Designer set to work by engaging directly with users and our Spanish Customer Care team. We learned a lot about expectations for content, needs for the content as well as existing level of confidence dealing with the healthcare system.

We learned that ordinary friction in multi-language experiences leads to a greater involvement of other people. For example, parents might recruit kids or neighbours as interpreters and guides. This insight helped us conceive of the website as a companion experience.

Given timelines (and lack of navigational complexity), we quickly designed a first round. We then on iterating through the design, along with engineering. The scrappiness and focus paid off and we quickly had prototypes ready for user testing.

I approached the design architecturally by considering the website as a series of modules, each with different communication or interaction roles. This allowed module by module development. Moreover, it made creating functional specification for engineers quicker.

Results

On time, and on budget, we launched a truly responsive website. This allowed our clients to point employees in our direction to have additional confidence making healthcare decisions. This was incredibly well received, bringing in new business for the coming year.