Kaiser Permanente Redesign

Kaiser Permanente Redesign

Redesigning the user experience and user interactions of Kaiser Permanente Hospital group’s website with 1M/Month visitors

Role: Senior UX Producer

As part of Redshift Digital Inc.—a San Francisco-based interaction design agency later acquired by Blink UX—I worked with a multidisciplinary team of UX designers, visual designers, usability researchers, and engineers to craft interaction design elements and visual compositions for Kaiser Permanente’s new responsive website. This platform serves over 10 million members.

Project Scope

Our team was responsible for conducting usability studies, designing UX and visual elements, and delivering a responsive prototype. These deliverables supported Kaiser Permanente’s internal teams as they began development of their new website, designed for both current members and prospective clients.

Collaboration & Process

We engaged with Kaiser Permanente’s teams weekly, focusing on different aspects of the platform. Key activities included: Reviewing requirements and creating wireframes. Producing low- and high-fidelity click-through prototypes. Conducting usability studies with members and prospective members. Delivering a fully responsive prototype in compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

My Role

I co-managed the team in collaboration with Redshift Digital’s senior leadership, taking on several responsibilities:

Strategic Leadership: Led Monday morning planning sessions to set deadlines and deliverables for research, UX, UI, and development teams.

Client Liaison: Served as the primary connection between Redshift’s internal teams and Kaiser Permanente’s design and management teams.

Sprint Management: Co-facilitated working sessions with Kaiser Permanente’s design teams, ensuring weekly goals and deliverables were met.

Iterative Delivery: Managed weekly sprint cycles to deliver prototypes, integrating feedback from Kaiser Permanente’s product and marketing teams. The project’s dynamic and fast-paced environment required agility to handle evolving requirements while maintaining quality. It was an incredible experience collaborating with a large team to deliver a platform of this scale, used by millions.

1. Balancing Innovation with Usability

Designing for diverse user groups requires striking a balance between cutting-edge features and intuitive usability to ensure accessibility for all users.

2. Collaborative Prototyping

Creating lo-fi and hi-fi prototypes facilitates effective communication with stakeholders and enables user testing to refine the design before final development.

3. Stakeholder Integration

Close collaboration with cross-functional teams ensures consistency in branding, visual design, and user experience, addressing both business and user needs effectively.

3 Lessons Learned

UX Design The challenge of developing interaction design elements and building a platform that is used by pretty much all user types, age-groups with different levels of tech savviness is finding balance. The balance between using every cool interaction element adapted by today’s top-notch tech platform vs. building something that complies with accepted usability standards making sure that anyone who uses your product will be able to understand its function and will achieve their user goals. We went back-and-forth between dreaming big and making the platform very simple and easy to use.

Personas Putting the end user in mind always set the boundries for creating interaction design elements. KP’s existing clientele and the average users in the U.S. helped us draw our lines for the user interaction guidelines for the entire project.

Persona Cards of KP Members. (Images are blurred to protect client confidentiality)

Prototyping

Our lo-fi & hi-fi click-through prototypes communicated our interaction design ideas with our client as well as testing them with end users before going into producing pixel-perfect comps.

Style Guide Our team collaborated with all of the related KP teams (marketing, branding, UX, et al.) to create a visual language for KP users that synthesizes the classic principles of good design with the innovation and possibility of technology and science.

Typography We chose Gotham, an extremely large typeface family featuring four widths, eight weights, and seperate designs for screen displays. As a result, we were able to utilize all the available styles for different interfaces.

Color Palette

We worked with KP branding and marketing teams to make a final decision on color palette of the platform and make it one of the best looking health platforms in the country.

It was a long marathon. I enjoyed every bit of this project and learned about the challenges of re-designing a large platform with many stakeholders and millions of users. Please send a note if you’ve worked on similar projects.

I’d love to read about it.