About the project
Blood Cancer UK's patient forum is an essential source of support for over 2,500 blood cancer patients and their families. Their feedback was that the forum made the difference between feeling isolated by their diagnosis and being surrounded by a 'family' of people going through the same challenges as them.
We were also hearing from those same people that navigating and accessing the forum was a source of frustration and anxiety.
Understanding the problem with user research
We undertook a series of moderated usability studies and 8 depth interviews with existing and prospective forum users.
We also built a website feedback form into the forum and explored the website data to understand user behaviour and potential pain points.
The key insights we learned were:
- The forum was too cluttered and confusing, one user described it as looking 'more like The Daily Mail than a forum' whilst another fed back that it didn't look like a forum at all.
- Posting onto the forum was intimidating. Instructions which were designed to be helpful put people off interacting on the forum.
- Fewer users were registering than we'd expect, given the number of users overall. Usability studies told us that registering was both complex and confusing. Password requirements were too complex and users were asked a series of unnecessary questions on sign-up.
The homepage on our forum, marked up with comments from usability studies
The sign up form on our forum, marked up with comments from usability studies.
What did we do?
We were lucky that the platform that hosts our forum, Discourse, is simple to edit. So after ideating with a cohort of both our support service staff, who manage the forum and some forum users, we tested our solutions live on the forum, using in-built analytics and usability studies to understand the impact of the changes we made. You can see the simplified forum screenshots below.
What was the outcome?
Since the redevelopment, one year ago, we have recorded the following statistics:
- Increase in monthly users, from c. 2,000 to c,10,000.
- 51% increase in sessions
- 109% increase in new users
Fundamentally, this means that people affected by blood cancer were able to get access to critically important peer support during their most vulnerable times.
