Services and content discovery at Well
I’m Hinrich, and I’ve recently joined Well as Content Lead. I’ve spent the past few years working with organisations like the NHS and the UK Government to help them design content that meets the needs of their users.
We’ve just done two weeks of discovery into Well’s services and content.
There are lots of services that Well offers but customers don’t know about or that might be difficult to administer for store staff. We’re looking at how we can maximise the potential of these services and any content related to them.
This services discovery sits alongside the work we’ve done so far on store finder and prescriptions.
Our goals
Discovery means understanding what customers need and how we can turn that into something that benefits the business.
The goal of the discovery is to decide which services to develop digitally in a way that stores can handle.
In our first two weeks we’ve been looking at these things:
- Well’s digital offer now
- how this offer is performing
- what the competition is doing
Well’s digital offer now
Currently only 4% of our web visits go to health services, for example quit smoking, sexual health or minor ailments service. When we talk about services, we have to remember that people come to our site to complete specific actions. They want to carry out these actions as painlessly as possible, for example, booking a corporate flu jab.
The quicker they can find the information and do the thing they want to do the more satisfied and likely to return they will be. We’ve identified that 74% of visitors enter the website through the homepage. This could be one of the places to promote specific services more to our customers.
There are 400,000 searches for service-related topics on Google a year. We should be able to get some of that traffic, give users what they want and benefit from it. The most searched for services relate to sexual health and flu at this time of year.
Website audit
We’ve also done a content and design audit of the website to understand what’s currently there.
We listed out each page and what it’s about and took a look at how easy it is to find the information.
As part of the design and user experience audit we’ve started an ‘interface inventory’ and begun to measure things like ‘page speed’, ‘time to first meaningful paint’ and other important metrics that impact the user experience.
Talking to customers and staff
User research is an important part of our discovery. We’ll be visiting Well stores to meet staff and customers to understand their needs and the way they talk about services. We’ll also be looking into how they think, behave and make decisions around managing their health.
All this will help us decide what to design. We’ll continue to ask customers for feedback at every stage of the project.
What the competition is up to
So far we’ve looked at around 50 pharmacy and digital health websites. We found that services are chronically undersold across the industry.
The main trend that we’re seeing is that the digital service offer is very much divorced from what’s going on in the stores.
Bleak is good
This might all sound a bit bleak, but actually it’s a big opportunity for Well. We’re offering a large range of very valuable services in stores that we’re not shouting about enough and in the right way.
Digital can help with this. It can, for example, make it easier for people to access services and for in-store staff to handle customers.
The NHS is already starting to tell people that a pharmacist can help you with your condition instead of sending them straight to the GP. So the tide is changing.
What’s next?
We’ll map out the big national services to understand the customer and staff journeys. This will show us what currently works and where there are issues.
We’ll also dig deeper into the data for these services to understand how they’re used and what financial impact key services can have.
This will help us to decide which services to focus on initially, so that we can make a plan how to go forward after discovery.
