Alberta Health Services Health Topics
Health Topics and Learning Modules were ongoing projects that I was responsible for working on with various clinical groups within Alberta Health Services in Calgary, Canada. This was while working on the User Experience team on myhealth.alberta.ca (MHA).
MHA faced a very real difficulty of organizing information and grouping and presenting it in a helpful way to users. The first issue being that we sourced our content from two places – from an external database called HealthWise, and the content that our SME’s created themselves. Additionally, there were legal and health requirements of the content, all within an often politically sensitive environment.
Our solution to part of this problem was to begin to work with grouping and structuring the content that we created, as this was content that we had control over. We developed 2 design solutions to try to address the most troublesome issues faced by the users.
Health Topics
Health Topics were made to be able to group the relevant content together in a logically structured and packaged way. Before health topics, pages were free standing and could only be grouped together using in-text links or a basic manually entered navigation. This made keeping track of content especially difficult for the SMEs and content team, and made navigating a very challenging experience for the user. Health Topics allowed us to conduct some small scale content reviews and restructure the content and presentation based on each groups’ needs.
These are not necessarily the best examples of great UX, but we did what we could with the constraints that we had in our given timelines and political environments. Here’s an example of a health topic and my contributions.
Speech, Language, and Hearing
Speech, Language, and Hearing was one health topic that I was able to consult with the group on from the very outset of the project, which meant we were on the same page about everything and were able to plan much better. While we didn’t have the resources or time allowance to do any preliminary user research, the SMEs often work directly with the users and could provide some insight into goals and motivations from their perspectives. While this isn’t ideal, it was still helpful in giving us an idea of how the information should be structured and organised.
Unfortunately, I left the organization before this project actually started to move to the screen, but I was able to do all of the planning and structuring of the IA. I worked very closely with the clinical groups to understand their concerns and challenges and was able to get an extremely in-depth understanding of what they needed to convey to their patients and users. From there, I helped them conduct a content review of what they currently had on the website before moving on to the new content. After it was developed, I had hoped to be able to conduct some evaluation through an open card-sort, but wasn’t able to in the time before I left.
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