Combined Pet Health Club and My Family Vets sites and implemented the new branding. Made the offering of Pet Health Club clearer and easier for clients to sign up, leading to a 16% increase in health plan sales and 6% in Plus plan sales.
Role
Product Designer - Design Lead
I led the design for the initial release of this project, from research to ideation to final hi-fi designs whilst working closely with our engineering team throughout the development process.
Timeline
October 2024 - March 2025
Company
Pet Health Club (IVC Evidensia)
Outcome
Increased health plan sales by 16%
Team
Acquisitions / Subscriptions
Scale
500,000 members, 600+ veterinary practices across the UK
Measurement Method
Product analytics comparing the three months before and after launch
Context
IVC Evidensia had 2 client-facing national brands, Pet Health Club (PHC) and My Family Vets (MFV).
Pet Health Club is a pet healthcare subscription for UK pet owners that includes a variety of benefits, with over 500,000 members it is one of the largest pet health brands in the country.
My Family Vets hosted 100s of pet advice articles and was designed to get clients from Google searches to booking a vet appointment.
The Problem
Having 2 national brands meant the brand prominence was split and at times we were competing with ourselves on Google.
We were planning on building a much stronger digital experience for pet owners in the future and we needed to choose a brand that would be the face of this new phase of the company. PHC was that chosen brand as it had more brand equity across the country.
PHC plan sales had also decreased recently so we also needed to find a way to increase general sales and sales of the new "Plus" plan.
Goals
Some goals were given by the leadership team, others were decided by the team and some were more personal to me, but still valid in my opinion.
Branding
Implement the new Pet Health Club branding successfully
Sales
Increase overall healthcare plans sold
Plus Plan
Increase the number of new Plus healthcare plans sold
Organic Traffic
Increase page visits to pet advice articles through SEO tactics
Discovery
I did various types of initial research to help paint the full picture of the problem I was trying to solve. These include:
User Journey Mapping - Determining all Jobs To Be Done and then mapping out existing and new flows.
Market Research - Comparing the current site to our direct and indirect competitors such as Vets4Pets, Medivet, Banfield, Battersea and PDSA. Mainly to understand how they approached certain areas such as plan tier pricing.
Google Analytics - Analysing our article data to see which of them are our most popular, what picture the numbers paint and what metrics we need to target to hit our goals.
Stakeholder Interviews - This project had a mixture of beneficiaries including our internal teams so I interviewed multiple departments to find out what they would need for this project to be a success. One example was the Content Team who needed the new site to be faster and easier to upload and edit content and also use the site to improve the SEO and reach of their articles.
User flow mapping
Stakeholder interviews
Jobs To Be Done
Article categorisation
Approach
The old PHC site always did a sub-par job in explaining what the plan was for and why it was beneficial for pets and their owners. That was one of the most important areas that I wanted to improve on.
Merging two sites with completely different goals meant working out what to bring over now, what comes later and what gets left behind. The core of MFV was the articles to generate organic traffic and the vet practice finder. Not only did these features have to be moved over, but I now had a chance to improve them both by seamlessly tying them into the PHC offering.
The MFV articles would result in a spike in SEO-led traffic in the long term, however in the short term we were likely to take a hit due to being on a new domain and needing Google to rank the new site. This meant having to use other pages and techniques to try and reduce that hit in the short term.
Ideation
After gathering various points of data from the discovery I started creating some wireframes. Focusing on the navigation to include featured articles, the pet advice hub page template, the article template and the vet finder page as these were pages that required the most thought, given that they would now be on a new site and the role they could now play.
Homepage wireframes
Navigation wireframes w/ featured articles
Pet advice hub template
Find a Vet wireframes
Design
Information Clarity
Redesigned homepage with a clearer breakdown of price, benefits and the differences between each plan.
New homepage with clearer tier information
Improved Vet Finder
The new vet finder page includes two main benefits, a directory of all PHC practices in each city and area in the UK which offered little benefit to clients but created a huge boost in SEO/organic traffic. The other benefit was a clearer vet finder and the ability to show and hide only PHC practices that offered health plans.
Contextual CTAs
With the addition of the pet advice articles the PHC site has more traffic from people concerned about their pet's health. The old articles had one generic “Book Now” CTA on the side of all the articles.
I saw an opportunity to make the CTAs more relevant to the content that the pet owners were reading at the time. I categorised all of our articles into 5 categories and then determined what would be the most helpful button for each category.
New Start = Register a pet
Prevention = Purchase a plan
Get Care = Book an appointment
Products = Visit the online shop
General = Subscribe to a newsletter
The "Dynamic CTAs"
An example of how the Dynamic CTAs worked. Product article = Product CTA.
Find a Vet - SEO Pages
After discussing with the SEO team about ways we could improve the SEO and organic traffic funnels of the site, I added a vet practice directory to the vet finder page to give the site a nationwide SEO boost, each area of the UK now has a dedicated page on the PHC site with a list of all practices and an SEO-rich paragraph containing long-tail search terms.
Practice directory
Example area page with listed practices and SEO content
Reflection
Collaboration - There were times when two squads were working on the site at the same time and we would end up working on the same problem without the other team knowing. This made me realise how important it is to have regular catch-ups with other teams and designers who work in a similar space to you to make sure everyone knows what each other is working on so time isn't wasted.
Developer telepathy - There were times when I would assume a developer understood how something is meant to work because of how I had designed it or because of their reaction to seeing the design, and then when they came to demo it, it didn't follow my idea. Since then I’ve learned to document and describe everything, to save time and effort for everyone involved.