Actions

My initial hunch was that the content at the top of the page didn’t work hard enough to explain:

• what a recovery certificate was

• why or when users should get a recovery certificate instead of taking a test

Instead of promoting the benefits of recovery certificates, we were using this valuable digital real estate to talk about what was needed to apply and how our doctors processed requests. Google Analytics and Hotjar told us that the majority of users saw this content before gradually dropping off and exiting the page.

I wasn’t very familiar with recovery certificates and I had a feeling that our audience felt the same way. PCR and lateral flow tests were still the predominant method of checking a person’s COVID-19 status.

I wanted to learn more about users’ needs when it came to getting a COVID recovery certificate to confirm this hunch.

This involved:

• reviewing user journeys to/from the current page (via Google Analytics) and how they engaged with the page (via Hotjar)

• organic desktop research to dig deeper into certificate-related queries and help identify knowledge gaps

• competitor analysis to see how competitors promoted their certificate service

My main finding was that users did have some basic knowledge gaps about recovery certificates such as:

• what certificates were/weren’t and what they could be used for

• the relationship between certificates and COVID tests (i.e. certificates could be used to show that someone was no longer infectious even if they still tested positive)

• how quickly they could get a certificate

With an updated user story and acceptance criteria, I rewrote the content at the top of the page (which we knew the majority of users saw) so we could move quickly.

This included:

• leading with information that aligned with users’ needs or knowledge gaps (i.e. what certificates are, benefits of certificates, speed of service)

• removing information that was a lower priority at this stage (e.g. what users needed to apply for a certificate)

• adding further links into the consultation while removing low priority journeys that could distract users (e.g. to our ‘terms and conditions’ page)

• rewriting content to sound more conversational and human (e.g. changing ‘in place of’ to ‘instead of’)

In order to move quickly, we did concede some battles where stakeholders were precious about certain operational information. On the bright side, we managed to reduce this and softened the language to make this easier to understand.