Travelers' Health
Overview
Collaborate with the CDC to explore and identify user needs to reimagine and redesign a mobile-first responsive prototype. Our goal was to create an engaging user experience that effectively assists young travelers in navigating their journeys abroad.
Role
Product Designer +
4 teammates
Timeline
4 Week Sprint
Tools
- Figma + Figjam
- Optimal Workshop
- Maze
What is CDC Travelers' Health?
CDC is the nation’s leading science-based, data-driven, service organization that protects the public’s health. The Travelers’ Health is a program designed to provide information and guidance to travelers regarding health and safety during international travel. The program aims to help individuals and healthcare providers stay updated on the latest travel-related health risks, recommendations, and precautions.
The Opportunity
Users would like to travel abroad in the transition era of the pandemic. The CDC would like to visually and functionally enhance their website to reduce stress amongst its young travelers.
The Goal
Establish user needs, design and create a mobile-first, responsive website that better engages users to help them navigate their travels abroad.
Who?
What?
Why?
How?
Targeting users who have traveled internationally and under 35 years old
What are users’ top health & safety concerns when traveling?
What are users’ experience with the current CDC website?
Why would users need access to health and safety information?
How do users ensure to stay healthy & safe while traveling?
How important is access to health and safety information and resources?
After conducting 7 user interviews collectively, we discovered that individuals are willing to go the extra mile to protect themselves from illnesses. They will consult healthcare professionals, obtain vaccines and medications, and will carry hand sanitizer and wipes as proactive measures to prevent falling ill.
We synthesized these findings into 3 main “I Statements”:
My few encounters with the CDC website were disappointing.
I want more accessibility when it comes to health information. Ease of use is important to me.
Original Site
We evaluated the current product to determine where we could improve – we measured the original site against industry conventions, hypothesized what challenges our users could potentially face, and how we better the over experience for our target demographic.
Testing The Original Site
While we hypothesized what problems our users faced off our own experience, we tested our theories through a moderated usability test with 3 users.
Scenario 1
Scenario 2
Tasks
You’re planning a trip to Anegada, find a clinic there in case of emergency.
You’ve been bitten by a mosquito in the midst of a Malaria outbreak in Costa Rica. Find out how to get diagnosed and check your symptoms.
Key Insights
- Navigation structure is unorganized and confusing. The website had too much content and lacked sufficient organization.
- Important information is not easy to read nor clear to the users
- Tasks were unable to be completed by all users
Competitive & Comparative Analysis
We sought understanding by evaluating others – identifying key strengths and taking valuable insights to inform our user-experience and design choices.
I focused my research primarily based on how our competitors showed up. The World Health Organization had large amounts of information, similar to the CDC, but managed to organize it in a digestible and accessible way for their users.
I also reviewed Conde Nast – a comparative site that has beautiful and aspirational imagery. Their proper use of visual hierarchy, size, text, and layout helped the user understand which elements belonged together and allowed for the ability to easily scan throughout the site.
Problem Space
To further our understanding of our user, we asked ourselves questions like:
1.
Who exactly is affected by our issue?
2.
Why does the problem occur?
3.
Why is the problem important?
Problem Statement: Young travelers need accessible and organized health information to make informed decisions about their health and safety while traveling. The abundance of content on the CDC website can be overwhelming and difficult to navigate, leading to inefficiencies, errors, and potential health risks from confusion and misinformation.
How Might We present health information to travelers in a way that is easily understandable and accessible?
Persona
We collaborated and synthesized to boil down our research into 1 target user – Cee
While Cee may have been our target demographic initially, it is important to consider all users for this widely-popular service organization. As the impact of the Pandemic starts to wan globally, many people spanning multiple generations will be traveling. According to Squaremouth.com, a travel insurtech company, Baby Boomers have out traveled every other generation, after nearly 90% drop in travelers during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Baby Boomers had the highest increase in total number of travelers in the first half of 2022 compared to the previous year.
To understand our Baby Boomer target user further, I created a proto persona so that we may consider their core needs.
Reimaging the navigation
To understand how to better organize the contents, we needed to analyze what the current structure of the site is. To our surprise, the site only had two main levels of navigation, featuring a very flat hierarchy. We hypothesized that is the main reason why the original site is challenging to navigate and easy to get confused.
After much deliberation, iteration, and enlisting the help from 10 different testers, we adjusted the navigation and organization of the website. We reduced down to 4 main categories from 9 at the secondary level and created more depth within the organization. While it may have taken us a few rounds and some opposing, but open conversations to finalize this structure, the team finally came to a consensus. Reminding them of the extensive research and data supporting we have done to support this final iteration, helped bring us back together. Although, still not perfect, is much closer to bringing clarity for our user than the original site.
Grayscale Prototype
Once the foundational work was established on the overall structure of the site, we were able to start sketching, wireframing, and ideating on our ideas. Zeroing in to the core function of the site was our main aim – making it efficient, learnable, accessible, and organized, alleviating the main pain points from the original site.
To enhance the overall user experience and the effectiveness of the interactions, we added intuitive navigation icons and established multiple flow points to enable users to access different sections within the website from every page.
Original
After
Usability Test
To get feedback from real users, we conducted both moderated tests as well as unmoderated tests through Maze. We tested a total of 5 users and were given 3 separate tasks to complete.
While we had decent results from the usability test, there was still some improvement that could be made to enhance efficiency of use and ensure the accessibility for all users:
1.
2.
Add filters and add the function to be able to sort options could help increase task efficiency
3.
Style Guide
High Fidelity Prototype
Next Steps
1. Do more User Research to
expand Target Demographics
2. Do more testing on Navigation and Information Architecture
3. Add AI Multilingual Chat Assistance
Reflection
While working alongside peers to evolve the CDC Travelers’ Website was seriously so great, there were great learnings I can implement in the next case study.
1. Stop to smell the roses – We were overly excited and gungho about this case study and concerned about the condensed timeline. At times, we valued quantity over quality. It would have benefitted us greatly to stop to think, stop to iterate, stop to question, to ensure we were on the right track every step of the way. It would have overall given us a better end product that better addressed the needs of our user and would have stopped any rework we had to do.
Let's Get in Touch!
I’m always interesting in exploring new opportunities and making new connections. If you have any inquiries, project concepts, or simply just want to say hello – I’d love to hear from you! Feel free to drop a line or reach out!
