Empowering users with knowledge: How we transformed content UX to better serve user needs

How we built a complex content solution for a health app that actually makes finding answers easy for users. By Valentina Nochka, a product manager, and Yulyana Karniushka, a content lead at Flo.

Let’s imagine the goal of your product is to help users understand their body signals so they can stay healthy and live better. One of your solutions is to give them the most credible, helpful, and complete information about their health. Say you have created hundreds of articles and videos with leading health experts. Is that enough? Well, not quite …”

At Flo, we are constantly improving our app’s content UX to empower users with knowledge. In this article, we will share our experience building complex content solutions for a health app.

Product: From user needs to a feature

Previously, content in our app’s Insights tab (think of it as a library) was organized as collections of articles or videos around different subjects, like period products, birth control, sleep, mental health, etc. Each collection had five to 20 or even more pieces of content in it.

We saw from our data that users were not interacting with that content as we expected. Instead of reading articles in a collection one by one, and consuming a collection as a whole, they would consume content across the collections. Also, from the research, we knew that users had difficulty finding actionable information even when they went to the search and asked specific questions.

Meanwhile, 75% of users who visit the Insights tab have a strong intent — they have some intimate questions they want to know the answer to or concerns around their health they want to understand more deeply. The former Insights tab structure wasn’t helpful for those users. We were putting all the work on the user, expecting them to proactively search for content and take time to find what they were looking for. So we were not solving their needs or being particularly useful.

After a few rounds of research and prototyping, we came up with the concept of special “pages” dedicated to answering the most pressing user questions to a key health topic or concern. Internally, we called them ‘intent pages’.

Intent pages were designed to:

• Help users to narrow down their questions: Based on user data, research, and our expert in-house medical knowledge, we identified the information areas that would be most relevant to the user on a broad health topic so they could quickly navigate to the answer.
• Answer those questions in the easiest way possible: The more relevant the information is, the higher it is on the page and the more space is given to it, with different content formats used to address different user needs.
• Take into account the users’ context: We allow the user to take further actions, such as logging their symptoms or moods, from the pages so that they can receive further relevant information or be alerted to cycle patterns in the future.

The intent page blocks can be changed and organized based on their relevance for the user and their needs. So pages dedicated to different topics can have different sections or formats and look slightly different.

For example, on the intent page about vaginal discharge, we help users to narrow down their questions about their vaginal discharge and answer them step by step. At the very top of the page, there’s a carousel with realistic images of discharge, so a person can quickly identify what their discharge means and check whether their experience is normal or not. They can also get quick answers to popular questions in the Q&A section and infographics, read in-depth articles, launch a diagnostic chatbot, or jump to popular related discussions with other users in Secret Chats, Flo’s anonymous community.

Content: How to organize content in the best way for the user

Since the pages we were constructing were a combination of content and features, we needed to find the best way to combine the two.

So, before we got to the actual content, we took a look at user needs for each health intent:

1. We defined and clustered user needs. This step helped us get a birds-eye view of the groups of user needs requiring responses for each page. At this stage, we had long lists of needs for each health intent.
2. We built a hierarchy of user needs for each intent page. We wanted to focus on the key user needs and address the most important ones first. For example, we know that one of the biggest needs when it comes to vaginal discharge is understanding what your discharge means and if it’s healthy or not — but it’s tricky to do that unless you have a clear visual reference. Or, when someone is wondering if they are pregnant, the very first thing they want to know — even before taking a pregnancy test — are the early signs of pregnancy. Plus, we didn’t want to overload the pages by offering too much information and diminish the user experience, so some less common user needs were eliminated at this stage.
3. We matched the user needs with possible content and features for each page. As the next step, we designed a “skeleton” of the page with the goal for each group of elements and the recommendations for what content and features to use. These were concrete enough to be clear on what we want to communicate, yet flexible enough for content editors and visual designers to be creative and contribute ideas on how to best convey the messages on each page.

The next stage was the actual content creation. Here, we wanted to stick to the following principles:

• We organized information as an inverted pyramid. This principle comes from journalism and means putting the most important information first and the supporting details and background of the story second. The who/what/when/why of a news article became the symptoms, relief tips and FAQs at the top of our intent pages — so someone who has a problem and needs quick answers can get them right away.
• Each next content item or group of content items should add new information. This is how we ensure all-around coverage while avoiding repetition.
• Include just enough content. It’s tempting to show everything that you have on a given subject, but showing too much content on a page could confuse a user and dilute their attention rather than help them get the answers they need.
• Create unique storytelling to enhance the value. You just can’t write about cramps and orgasms in the same way!

Plus, as a side bonus, this process allowed us to identify gaps in our content on certain important topics that we could quickly address.

In our second article, we delve into the details of the technical solution that allowed our content teams to create new intent pages without needing to involve engineering effort.