A new experience
for virtual visits
Content design | UX writing | User research
Summary
Teladoc Health's legacy product lacked a central space for members to manage their visits. Our UX team was tasked with redesigning and expanding the past visits page to include upcoming and canceled visits. Informed by research, audits and data analysis, I developed a content strategy to address key pain points. I created the information architecture, contributed to wireframes, and produced all content for testing and implementation. My collaboration with user research, design, product and engineering resulted in a user-friendly visits experience for all members.
The challenge
Teladoc Health is a leading virtual healthcare provider. Members use the native app and web platforms to connect conveniently with care providers across the globe. It’s critical that members have a smooth visit experience, and the product needed a central space for pre- and post-visit information. By removing key friction points, we could also address key business OKRs, like increasing visit follow-through, care plan adherence and improved member satisfaction.
RESEARCH
I conducted an in-depth study with design and product partners, our internal user research team and an outside vendor to understand the mental models of people seeking care. This included card sorting and a value statement concept test that I developed to evaluate whether people tend to orient their health and medical information around their diagnoses and data, treatment timeline, care journey or care team.
The study explored all aspects of the typical healthcare journey. Some pain points that participants raised are inherent in healthcare, like provider-to-provider communication. Many mentioned challenges in locating, downloading and sharing health records. Electronic health record interoperability was beyond our scope, but it was evident a clearer path to downloading and sharing records would be a win. Other participants noted how important it was to keep track of their provider's treatment instructions. Making it easy to find visit summaries was something else we could do.
Diagnoses and data
The conditions I need to manage, or the indicators that tell me how healthy I am.
I value being able to easily:
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View health readings (like blood pressure) or test results
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Track how my health has changed over time
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Get help from experts who understand my conditions
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Find my care instructions
Care team
The people who help me manage my health and provide me treatment or advice.
I value being able to easily:
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Schedule time with my care team and ask them questions
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Find their recommendations and instructions
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Share details about our interactions with the other members of my care team
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Manage my care team relationships, and choose new providers as needed
Treatment timeline
Past and upcoming visits, or the points in time my health information was collected. I value being able to easily:
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Find visit summaries and treatment plans
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Request follow-up care
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Prepare for a scheduled visit
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Download my medical record
Care journey
The steps I've taken to get healthy and the tasks I still need to complete to reach my goals. I value being able to easily:
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See care plans from my past visits
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Follow through on referrals and recommendations from my care providers
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Create new action items
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Track my progress
My value statement concept test gave us insights that shaped not only our visits page, but all of our health information pages.
USER INTERFACE (UI) AUDIT
To understand the breadth of our problems, I audited the visit experience in our product. We had a confusing, disjointed experience.
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Upcoming visits: Members coming to the app to prepare for a visit or join it at the scheduled time could only do so through a small visits component on their homepage. This component provided minimal details: visit type, date and time. Members used this same component to reschedule or cancel a visit.
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Past visits: A past visits carousel at the bottom of the homepage created redundant entry points to another page, where members then had to scroll through a list of visits for the summary they needed. Referral orders and other visit documents were housed in a third page. The past visits page lacked a clear hierarchy and context for record sharing. It was riddled with unfriendly terminology, like the clinical diagnosis for each visit.
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Canceled visits: Some members are charged a fee for canceled or missed visits. Yet, there was no record in the product of these visits.
MEMBER SATISFACTION AND DATA ANALYSIS
I wanted to understand our members’ most common questions or concerns, and how we might proactively address them through content. I reviewed our Member Support team’s complaint logs and analyzed direct feedback from members, provided through surveys and product reviews. I found that members consistently ask about costs and express mismatched expectations, particularly about excuse notes, prescriptions and dermatology care, which is delivered via their message center instead of a face-to-face visit. This aligned with my evaluation of our web search and FAQ utilization data.
CONTENT AUDIT
Educational content was not a requirement, only a request to surface key policy links. But nobody appreciates a list of rules. I had a hunch that this page could better educate our members about what to expect from a visit. Weaving our policies into this content would make them feel like a natural part of the experience.
I mapped our visit scheduling journey to evaluate the quality of educational content presented at key steps. I also audited our blog, help library and FAQ content. I found visit education embedded within our request-a-visit flows, provided in visit communications and publicly available online. But the quality was inconsistent. I noted wide gaps in dermatology and prescription education, and delegated a deeper audit to another member of my team. She and I then engaged our Content Production team to round out our library of educational content.
Frequent pain points
Cost transparency
How much will I pay?
Are there fees to cancel?
Visit expectations
What will happen?
Will I see a doctor?
Where do I find my provider’s instructions?
Prescriptions
Will I get a prescription?
Who can prescribe?
Can you refill my prescription?
Excuse notes
How do I get an excuse note?
Why didn’t I get an excuse note?
Section Title
My problem analysis uncovered 5 key pain points:
Inability to manage all visits, cost transparency, poor expectation setting, medical jargon and notification system errors.
The solution
The problem analysis pointed toward what the new visits page needed to become. Next, I mapped out the jobs to be done, which varied by visit type and phase of the member journey. My design partner and I matched each job to be done with features we believed would help accomplish it. Our product manager and engineering partners helped us layer in feasibility and scope.
We landed on three primary jobs to be done:
CONTENT STRATEGY
I kept my content strategy simple, grounded in foundational tenets with nuanced meaning.
Keep it
simple
This is not the first time they will see this information
Keep it
clear
Even if we can’t fix a problem, we can still be informative
Keep it
connected
Create new entry points and use consistent terminology
Keep it
obvious
Embed answers, don't make members hunt for them
Keeping the content simple and clear did mean using friendlier terminology. But it also meant intentionally minimizing the amount of content, while thoughtfully adding complementary context, like clarifying how visit records are shared. It was clear from my analysis that this was not and should not be the only place members learn about their visit experience. The page could prime members about what to expect during and after a visit, or even how to troubleshoot joining a video visit. But in-depth content about specific visit types would be more effective in direct communications, or further up our funnels at key decisions points. This page would reinforce what members learn elsewhere, with content to address only the most common pain points. We could link those with intent to explore to our self-help library.
Introducing new content and links would help connect the care experience. For example, guiding members from this page to their care plan to track tasks from all their visits. Or, adding the invoice link when a canceled visit resulted in a fee.
I also looked for ways to embed answers to top questions within the page, like summarizing our lengthy policy pages. Or including a member’s copay in the visit details, instead of redirecting them to a cost overview page.
WIREFRAMING, PROTOTYPING AND TESTING
I drafted an information architecture proposal I later married with ideas from my design partner. We then independently drafted wireframes in Figma, combining our ideas in high-fidelity iterations. We polished our concepts with input from product, research, clinical and engineering partners.
I worked with our user research team lead and an outside vendor to prepare the study plan for concept and usability testing. A time constraint meant we could not test all the features we’d hoped to include. This limitation challenged me to think creatively about how to elicit the responses I needed from participants to inform the final design. For example, I could not test a second concept with longer-form educational content to gauge preferences. Instead, I crafted questions to determine the sufficiency of minimal content.
The usability testing was successful, with only minor confusion around our dermatology service that we expected.
DELIVERY
After a few rounds of iterative content and design changes to address the study feedback and diminished scope, I prepared our files for development hand-off. The focus of the first release was a true MVP, leaving room for exceeding expectations and delight for future iterations.
Highlights of the final design include:
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A comprehensive experience with upcoming, past and canceled visits accessible through page tabs.
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Policy summaries addressing prescriptions, cancellation fees and excuse notes (An alternate concept included a visit quick guide and troubleshooting modals, contact information and a link to our member self-help center. These tested well but were descoped).
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Dynamic visit cards that provide more information to members than previous designs, like co-pay and reason for visit.
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Iconography and variable content to help members distinguish differences in visit types.
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Tags on past visits to indicate linked documents, like referral orders and excuse notes.
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A status indicator for Dermatology visits, to reinforce when the member can expect a message.
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Quick links to past visit summaries and invoices.
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Empty-state content variants that educate members about what to expect, with a call to action to schedule care.
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Content variants for visits in a negotiation state, where the member or care provider is waiting for confirmation of a requested visit time.
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Links to complete important checklists and assessments for Primary Care and Mental Health visits (the phrase “Get ready” was carefully selected for both care options. It minimized development level of effort, preserves the motivational intent, and remains applicable after the task is complete and the member is reviewing or updating submitted responses).
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New content prompting members to update their medical history and upload recent lab results before visits, with links to take action (outdated medication and allergy history is a common care provider challenge).
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Greater visual prominence and new content to better communicate what is downloaded or shared in the member’s health records.
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Simplified navigation terminology — Visits, no longer Past Telehealth Visits.
The outcome
Work on the visits page will continue. We had plenty of ideas that weren’t implemented in the first release, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be. Pivoting was a necessary part of our process to correct scope creep and address constraints.
The audit I completed is informing our Content Production team’s efforts to expand our Member Self-Help Center. And the analysis of our Voice of Consumer reports is fueling other committees I’m on to enhance our product notifications related to visits.
The Visits page was released in April 2024, and has new data instrumentation to compare how the page performs against past metrics. For example, we know member visit summaries have a CTR of about 50%. But that number should climb higher now that they are more discoverable. We will also be able to track conversion rates of the new empty states, how many members complete pre-visit tasks, and the impact of linking invoices for canceled and no-show visits.