How we used research to refresh our brand values
Six months ago, we opened our usability lab, the PoD, at our Manchester HQ. I wrote about our first three research sessions not long after that, and since then, we have carried out 70 hours of research with nearly 80 users internally and externally. We’ve had sessions with patients, doctors, businesses, staff, and charities to find out how we can improve our service.
Push Doctor is working to become more data-driven and user-focused thanks to the introduction of senior team members like our Head of Design, Sabato. The PoD has been instrumental in this journey, allowing us to constantly gain feedback on our ideas for new features and improvements to our existing service.
Since the business transitioned from a marketing-led business to a product-led business, there has been a lot of change. Our brand values and mission were not in line with the new vision for the business. We’d been running through our website in user research sessions to get an idea of what users thought the service was, and how far removed their thoughts were from what we had presumed they would think. It was time for a refresh to bring our intent and vision in line with the users’ perception.
Working collaboratively between marketing, design, product and human resources we came up with lots of ideas of how we could update our values. After several internal sessions with employees, we arrived at a range of ideas that we collectively felt embodied our company and the people within it.
We wanted to see what our patients thought of our ideas, and so organised a focus group — presenting current users with examples of messaging, colour schemes and imagery that we could use on both our website and app.
The session was more informal and relaxed than sessions we had run previously, and we were surprised by how much we could cover in such a short time. This was the first focus group we had held since the PoD became the PoD, and we weren’t sure what to expect. Feedback from patients was mixed, however. They liked some aspects of our ideas but did not respond well to others. We felt that due to the laid-back nature of the session we weren’t able to get the insights we hoped for. We also understood pretty quickly that we needed to describe how our values were applicable externally, as well as internally.
After the sessions we regrouped, and for two weeks the design team spent time exploring brand ideas. They arrived with three very different ideas that they wanted to test with users for a second time. For the second focus group, we wanted to see how our brand came across to new users, not existing patients. We recruited seven participants across a range of demographics and backgrounds for focus group number two.
Working with members of the marketing team we were able to deliver a much more structured session and the findings were much more helpful. In this session, we tested our revised brand values alongside three possible concepts for updates to our brand identity. The feedback for brand values was very positive this time around, but reactions to the visual side of things were still mixed.
We launched our new brand values earlier this month but decided we needed more time to explore our visual branding before we made any significant changes. This project is still ongoing, as of writing. We will keep you posted with any exciting developments, as and when we feel ready to share them.
We run sessions like these on a regular basis so we can continually learn more from patients. If you would like to be considered for inclusion in these sessions, please get in touch by emailing thepod@pushdr.com
Ellen
User Researcher
