St. Jude Children's Research Hospital - Needs Updating
A page description i’d like to show
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
In a 2 week timespan (Nov 2 - 8), I completed an in-depth analysis of the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital website. The following are my findings.
Heuristic Evaluation & Summary of Insights
In order to conduct a heuristic evaluation of the site, I employed the Abby Method. This method analyzes a site based on 10 heuristic principles: find-ability, accessibility, clarity, communication, use, credibility, controllability, value, learnability, and delight.
A few of the bigger issues I found were:
(Findable) The Science & Medicine News Carousel on the homepage is difficult to navigate on an iPhone (XS). My suggestion is to work on the responsiveness of the site to make it more mobile-friendly.
(Communicative) None of the navigation links appear as active to inform the the user of where they are within the site. This is a simple fix and would make a significant different in how a user experiences the site.
(Useful) In the Clinical Trials page, users may not be able to find the trial they are searching for if they don't know what category it falls under. My recommendation is to conduct A/B testing to find a better way to help users locate the trial that they are searching for.
(Delight) The homepage is not kid-friendly. St. Jude is a children's hospital that focuses on children of all ages. Some of those children have access to the internet and may search for this hospital. The tone, imagery, and content can be made warmer and friendlier to appeal to and to comfort an audience with a wider age range.
Competitive & Comparative Feature Analysis
The hospital’s 3 main comparators are:
Children’s National Medical Center
Boston Children's’ Hospital
Cincinnati Children’s
I analyzed 10 site features for each site and found some key differences in where St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is either succeeding or can do better:
Logo: The logo’s placement and relative size is similar on all of the sites, but Children’s National Medical Center is the only site that makes the logo kid-friendly. The teddybear is warm and welcoming for children, unlike the other sites whose logos seem to aim to evoke emotion (praying children, mother and child, etc.)
Landing Page: While St. Jude’s landing page is better than some, Boston Children’s Hospital presents Spanish text on their homepage; this makes them appear more inclusive to different families.
Footer: St. Jude’s does a relatively good job with their footer. They include the necessary information (non-profit status, privacy notice, disclaimers, linking policy, HIPPA, ad choices, notice of non-discrimination, sitemap, language options) to keep it from getting too busy.
The American Heart Association is a comparator of the hospital. I critiqued the same 10 features in the comparator site and found the site to display its features very well. The site is simple, clean, accessible, and makes content easily digestible. One thing in particular that was was great to see was the sparsity with which they display the donate option. Unlike St. Jude’s site, which bombards users with donation options, the American Heart Association site asks for donations much less.
Information Architecture
Original Sitemap
Card Sorting
Card sorting was conducted on 6 users
Average user age was 32 years old
3/6 rounds were open
3/6 rounds were closed with the option to become hybrid (I provided sticky notes and markers in case the provided “categories“ were deemed insufficient by the users); 2/3 closed rounds became hybrid rounds.
