User research on health tools

Lægehåndbogen (Doctor’s Handbook) and Patienthåndbogen (Patient’s Handbook) have more than 2,500,000 users every year. Each handbook consists of thousands of articles addressing diseases, medicine, and health.

Who is the user?

When we first met the team behind Lægehåndbogen and Patienthåndbogen, they were asking lot of questions about their users. So far they had only looked at data from Google Analytics, and they needed to get at more holistic knowledge of their users.

The research process started with a brand analysis of the two handbooks where we identified the demographics of the users, market penetration, and much more. 

With the brand analysis and Google Analytics data as the foundation for our understanding, we needed to talk to the users.

Focus group with doctors

To get a deeper understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the Doctor’s Handbook we arranged a focus group with 11 doctors.

We wanted to understand the workflow of the doctors and asked about the context of use of the Doctor’s Handbook. We also did an extensive analysis of the content of the handbook, collecting a wide range of feedback, critique and ideas from the participants.

Additionally, we asked them to think about their needs and what they would like from the handbooks in the future, in order to get ideas for new features and content.

Eye-tracking and think-out-loud tests with patients

The third analysis we did was a combined eye-tracking and think-aloud test with users of the Patient’s Handbook.

We gathered a wide mix of end-users representing most of the Danish population. Using eye-tracking we got a detailed understanding of how the users read articles and what they look at at each page. And using a qualitative test and interview method, we learned about what they were thinking and experiencing.

Mixing eye-tracking with a qualitative test methodology gave some really interesting insights, sometimes even contradictory. Being able to analyze on both how the users were reading and how they were reflecting gave a very nuanced view on their experience, that the team behind the handbook can use for future decisions about the development of the tool.

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