Increased client registrations by 21% by re-designing the website template for 1000+ veterinary practices across the UK, improving usability for pet owners and reducing workload for practice staff and our Content Team.
Role
Product Designer - Design Lead
I led the design from initial research to ideation to final design, whilst working closely with our engineering team throughout the development process.
Timeline
May 2024 - Jan 2025
Company
IVC Evidensia
Outcome
Increased registrations by 21%
Team
Acquisitions
Scale
1000+ practices
Measurement Method
20-site pilot test
Context
IVC Evidensia is Europe’s largest veterinary company with over 1,200 practices across 10 countries resulting in being responsible for the health and wellbeing of millions of animals. The UK is their largest market with 1000+ practices across the nation.
Each veterinary practice has their own website built using a choice of 4 templates. Each template comes with a range of components and flexibility regarding colours, fonts, etc. These templates were designed by the developers during IVC's earlier years and over the years been built on again and again.
The Problem
The templates for IVC’s 1000+ veterinary practice websites had become cluttered with tonnes of irrelevant information which made it difficult for pet owners to get the care they needed and caused unnecessary manual work for the practice staff.
There were 2 primary problems with the old templates:
Content Overload
The practice staff had a strong say about what was added to their website (I know, this seems fair).
However this resulted in everything being added, from Pet of the Month awards (that hadn’t been updated since 2019) to a page dedicated to the recently retired receptionist. These are great sentiments, but this just created noise that got in the way of existing and new clients looking to get their pet the care they need.
These new pages always “had to be at the top" of the navigation, meaning the Content Team had no choice but to add more items in the navigation bar, creating an endless list of links and dropdowns, distracting clients and getting in the way of the main job that they came here to do.
Outdated Goals
The primary CTAs on the existing templates weren’t aligned with the new objective of the business.
The new goal was trying to reduce the unnecessary workload for the practice staff so they had more time to do the jobs that were more impactful. The idea was to allow clients to self-serve wherever possible, freeing up time for both clients and practice staff.
We were also trying to get more new pet owners to join our practices. The current sites were built to drive bookings with existing clients, whilst every other job was a secondary thought left for the pet owner to find on the site.
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.
Scalable
Must work for vet practices of all sizes and specialities.
Registrations
Increase net new registrations of pet owners.
Phone calls
Decrease phone calls to practice.
Time-saving
Save time for Content Team by reducing pages.
Stability
All other metrics remain stable.
Satisfaction
Practices are happy with their branding usage.
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 - Mapping out the existing user flows from all entry points (social, in-practice, direct to website, etc) to see the full journey and identify any flaws and areas for improvement.
Market Research - Looking at the current state of the market, relevant metrics (number of new pet owners, dog/cat population), the market share of practices owned by IVC compared to our competitors, determining if the IVC is "down" or if it's a market-wide issue.
Google Analytics - Using the data from our 1000+ practices I was able to look at a vast amount of data to see what pages our pet owners were visiting most and what jobs they were looking to get done.
Competitor Analysis - Analysing the websites of direct and indirect competitors to see how their websites differ and what they do well. The common problem with this however is that most other markets/direct competitors weren't set up like IVC was, from a scale or a brand perspective.
User flow mapping
Competitor analysis
Google Analytics data
Approach
To redesign the template I had to determine what clients actually wanted to do on their local vet practice site. Analysing our Google Analytics data I found what the main Jobs To Be Done were and what areas served little value. The data showed pet owners just wanted their pet to get the care they needed in the easiest way possible, whether that’s registering a pet, booking an appointment or ordering medication. This meant I could focus on de-cluttering the site and navigation from unnecessary links, pages and buttons. Along with clear signposting, I also streamlined these primary journeys for clients and practice staff making it much easier to find and complete these jobs.
Culling the majority of content also freed up hours for the Content Team who would have otherwise spent time updating it. Acquisition of net-new clients was a big metric in this project so I had to work with Marketing and consider how SEO and the now-limited content would play a part in attracting these new clients via organic traffic funnels. All content had to follow the correct structure and had to be totally crawl-able by search engines (no unnecessary modals or dropdowns).
Team Collaboration
Product Manager: Worked together to determine OKRs, success metrics and what each sprint would involve.
Engineering: Helped decide how complex forms and designs would be feasible to build.
Marketing: Made the risk of removing lots of content clear and suggested ways we could reduce the SEO hit.
Ideation
Ideation started with mobile-first (our largest traffic funnel) wireframes with various combinations of layouts, component types, order and hierarchy. My thinking was to create an "easy access" homepage with all tasks to be quickly accessible at the top and all necessary information to be a simple click away with the use of anchor links.
Mobile-first wireframes of some early concepts
Multiple concepts and flows during the ideation phase
Design
Navigation
Redesigning the navigation meant removing all non-priority links, arranging links into relevant groups and upgrading the main CTA links into buttons to increase clarity in decision making.
Old navigation with 14 links.
New navigation with just 6 links, but all relevant pages/jobs still easily accessible.
JTBD Action Tiles
Bringing the main JTBD to the forefront of the homepage into eye-catching tiles allows the majority of clients to quickly achieve their goal without having to think about where they need to go.
Smart User Flows
Updating the current user flows was a benefit to the client and the practice staff. On the old sites, all registration, online payment and order flows were long 'dumb' forms with no logic and gave all the questions to the client at once.
The new forms used smart logic dependent on the previous answer and chunked the questions so all content fits above the fold on mobile. The forms also asked more crucial information that the practice needed. Previously, the practice would have to waste time calling the client to ask for this extra information.
Some forms are now longer than before, however my research found that clients are willing to answer a longer list of questions if they think it's valuable to them, and to a pet owner nothing is more important than their pet's health.
Personalised questions with logic from previous answers.
Questions that weren't previously asked, forcing staff to call client.
Questions that weren't previously asked, forcing staff to call client.
Get Care
Condensing the multiple ways to receive veterinary care into one Get Care button leads to a much simpler way for clients to get their pet’s care. A worried pet owner might not know what type of appointment their pet needs, but we do, so we do the thinking for them.
Get Care dropdown showing all care types.
Get Care page with an explainer for each category.
Design System
The existing templates were built without any designs so for this new template I created a component library from scratch to help development run more smoothly and to allow for other designers to ideate and design faster and more consistently for future development.
I also curated a set of colours and fonts available for the practice to choose from to fit their branding. I wanted to make sure the practices felt they had some freedom in this area whilst not compromising the likes of accessibility and brand guides at the same time.
Snippet of the component library
Reflection
This was my most complex project to date so I learnt a lot about UX and design but also about people, communication and collaboration. Throughout this project, we had bi-weekly meetings with all relevant parties run by our squad, and these sessions worked well. However, if I were to do this project again I would also have individual catch-ups with each team to allow them to ask more detailed questions and make sure their concerns were heard as there were scenarios where information was missed or assumed by various teams which led to issues and delays further down the line.