You’ve spent a lot of time, effort and resources redesigning your hospital Website. You’ve launched the new site and it looks awesome. However, when you look at the metrics, they’re not as impressive as you had hoped. What went wrong? If you didn’t conduct a hospital Website usability testing prior to launching the new site, now is a good time to do so – and the sooner, the better. As great as your site may look, it’s not effective if users cannot get what they need from it. We talked with Holly Smith, Director, Strategic Planning and Marketing, at St. Mary's Health in Evansville, Indiana about her organization’s strategy for usability testing. Holly was willing to share the keys to a successful focus group and offer insightful advice. Q: How often do you aim to perform usability studies? A: St. Mary’s conducts many usability studies throughout the year. We really feel that our patients, our families and the community at large have a significant voice in how we share information and resources for them. Our most recent usability study was done with Greystone.Net. It was a wonderful asset to see usability on our current site before launching a new site [to see] where we can improve. Q: How many areas of focus do you have with each study? A: We like to focus on areas of conversion and ROI, like finding a doctor, signing up for newsletters, downloading information, paying a bill, logging into the portal, and giving. Q: What type of recruiting techniques do you suggest when putting together focus groups? A: We really like to be transparent with our recruiting. If they are already coming to our computer lab, this isn’t a blinded study. So, we really like to use social media – specifically LinkedIn and Facebook - for recruitment. Q: Do you have an in-house team to recruit and perform the studies? A: As the director, I am the primary leader – really because I have the market research background. I have moderated my own groups, but we have used other resources for market research such as Greystone.Net and our agency. Q: How have usability studies helped St. Mary’s overall digital strategy? A: We learned so much! How [the users] think and seek information. How we need to make our site funnel more intuitive. There are too many choices right now and [it can be distracting]. Also, we need to include physician and health information on service line pages. [Users] also really like to use the search function – so tagging pages is really important. If your organization is thinking about performing usability testing, or if it has been a while since you’ve done so, Greystone can help you with the process! We’ve assisted many organizations, including St. Mary’s Health, with usability testing. Contact us at 770-407-7670, email us at info@greystone.net, or fill out our information form. We’ll be happy to help!