Practitioner Referral Program
Sector: Healthcare/Nutraceutical
The company in the healthcare sector wanted to provide a solution to consumers that did not have a referring practitioner to find one in there area and purchase product.
Problem Statement
Analytic data presented information on volume of customers that were searching for brand, upwards of 90k unique per month. Since this was a closed platform, consumers could not purchase without a referring practitioner. We needed to provide a way for these consumers to buy product, but keep our promise to our healthcare practitioners as an exclusive line.
Users & Audience
- Estimated 70% of unique visitors are female and 65% on mobile device
- 90k organic unique visits per month with no marketing spend
- Keyword searches for specific products proved that there was a market for consumers looking to buy specific products
Most likely, these were patients referred to the brand by their healthcare practitioner, but private referral codes had not been shared with the patient to grant access to the site.
Roles & Responsibilities
I assumed the following roles on this project:
- User Experience (UX) Researcher
- Project Manager
- Creative Director
- Usability Testing
Other team members I managed on this project:
- User Experience (UX) Designer
- User Interface (UI) Designer
- Front-End Developer
- Back-End Developer
- Content Writer
Scope and Constraints
This project was broken out into three phases. First phase of the project was marketing to our practitioner audience to gauge interest in participation. Second phase was an online registration section to collect the information they wanted shared with potential patients. Last phase was the mapping and referral listing by location of nearest practitioner.
- Top-tier practitioners were to be highlighted by a badge preferred icon
- Only practitioners who elected to participate and signed the agreement we included in the listing
- Practitioners needed to complete their profiles, including languages, specialty, physical location, etc.
Process
The team worked in two-week design sprints, fast prototyping concepts that would be tested with practitioners and patient customers, depending on the phase. Based on feedback, the team would complete the design prototypes, passing designs to front-end developer that would include any scripts and visual assets, then passing final designs to back-end developer for implementation.
The development team would compile designs onto our staging environment, then all team members participated in usability testing and, finally, the project would be implemented in the production environment.
My specific role involved researching and providing the strategy, leading the user experience team through design sprints, writing the usability testing scenarios, presenting the program details to the sales team and our practitioner customers through webinars.
Outcomes and Lessons
The program was successful in connecting new patients with a healthcare practitioner, but more importantly, we were able to connect patients with their existing practitioner, in lieu of a referral code, which was required previously.
In addition, this provided practitioners with a way of growing their patient base, which was difficult for many that had to close doors due to the COVID pandemic. Many healthcare practitioners did not have an online store or web presence to support their private practice.
