Help users find symptoms content

[BrieWhyatt]

The Information Architecture team on NHS.UK are working to help users find our content about symptoms. We are currently in an Alpha phase looking at this work.

What is the problem?

• Users expecting a dedicated place to search for symptoms
• Users using vague terms in Search and not getting or recognising a suitable result
• Users looking for symptoms in A-Z
• Checking symptoms is a top task for nhs.uk
• Users should be able to self-manage - info seeking modes
• Currently have no specific research on symptom information
• Patient-facing taxonomy and controlled vocabulary - synonyms, body parts, seasonal searches
• Users are searching with body part terms which is returning a low click-through rate

How do we know its a problem?

• Evidence/insight for users failed searches for symptoms, in hotjar and usability research
• Analytics - users typing in ambiguous terms and body parts

Whose problem is it?

• Our responsibility as the IA team to support user's information seeking modes to improve health outcomes of our users
• The problem for users is that they are unable to find suitable info based on the terms they use to search with
• If they can't find symptom info on nhs.uk, they may go to less trusted sources or use GP/A&E services when its not needed

Is the problem being handled elsewhere (wholly or partly)?

• A-Z currently houses symptoms
• Search will surface symptom information and handles mis-spellings
• NHS 111 online (we are not replicating this)
• Symptoms pages in Mental Health hub
• NHS App - online consultations for symptoms - triage to online consultations

We validated in discovery research that users aren't finding what they need on NHS.UK, are turning to other less reliable health sites and cite that the NHS website isn't high in Google search rankings. We know users are looking to find out what their symptoms may be caused by, how they can treat them, whether they need further support and if the symptom is normal.

[BrieWhyatt]

In our first round of alpha research we tested creating a 'Symptoms' hub - a dedicated place for users to find symptoms content. We tested two different designs:

We are yet to complete our analysis on this research, but the symptoms type design (with groups of different types of symptoms), seemed to have made more sense to the users we tested with.