mnorthuis
commented
2 years ago Hi @nicko-amida! Thank you for walking me through where you are at. This one is a tough nut to crack for sure. Here are the areas of consideration from an IA perspective that we talked through today. We can leave this issue open until the designs are finalized and use it for any further collaboration needed until then. Please reach out if you have any questions!
- The flows appear to assume that users are going to enter at the very top level page and then drill down into either the DoD or VA system
- Have you mapped against all possible entry points such as facility locator, search, external links (emails, social media, bookmarks, etc.)? Many of these may have users entering at deeper levels.
- Looking at analytics of existing VAMC sites to compare the entry % on the location pages versus the top level health system level, page views, and previous page data may be helpful.
- Navigation components in the mocks are not accurately representing the structure.
- Top level/entry page shows DoD and VA systems as children by showing them in the left nav, but once on those pages, reference to the entry page is gone and it appears as though you are now on the top level.
- The "entry page" could be included as the top level of the structure, if the content is deemed important and should be made available to visitors on any page in either system. If so it should be represented within the breadcrumb and left nav. This may require some left nav work to include "Systems" as another navigation level.
- The "entry page" could also be considered an independent page that just serves as a routing page, and possibly not important to the experience once the right destination is found. In this case, you could consider removing the left nav entirely from that page to remove the illusion of a hierarchy, and have 2 CTAs towards the top to direct traffic, and any child pages of that entry page linked to from within the content of the page.
- There are other variations of these 2 options that can be explored, but knowing the role that "entry page" plays in the overall experience, for all entry points, will help determine how to proceed.
- Some implications of inaccurate navigation components:
- Users cannot easily identify where they are in the site, how pages are related, or how to navigate within the structure.
- Using the left nav sends a signal that you are in a hierarchy and shows you all content related to the top level. In the current state, the DoD and VA systems appear as children AND siblings to one another, but once you click over to one of them, the top level page disappears from the all navigation components along with the reference to the sibling.
- What content is intended to be shared versus duplicated between systems?
- What ability does CMS have to share content into multiple health system hierarchies? Or will content be duplicated across multiple health systems in order to appear in each one
- Duplicated content - will have impacts on SEO and findability. The differences are very subtle, so ensuring users who come directly to a page with very similar content are clear they are on either the DoD or VA version will be important.
- Content hierarchy of the DoD versus VA alerts (shown at the top of the pages in mocks)
- Since the alert is related to the page they are on, placement within the page's content be more appropriate and more visible than in a global/site level alert. Recommend testing this.
nicko-amida
mmiddaugh
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Background
The Lovell Federal health care system is taking on a unique design pattern: there are two distinct user flows for VA and for DoD members. Updates have been made to the side nav, user flow, and a new top level intermediary page has been created.
Help we need
(Let's meet for any explanation/questions - @nicko-amida)
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