Summary
Context
The Bupa Health Coaching team offer telephone-based health support services to members with ongoing health conditions.
Focusing on preventative health, the team wanted to expand to include people younger than the traditional customer group in the hope that an earlier intervention would have greater preventative outcomes.
This had been attempted before but hadn’t reached the desired level of success. The aim of this project was to find different ways to attract a new audience the existing program.
Project goals
- Re-examine the problem – collate existing learnings and identify gaps
- Learn more about our target customer, their needs, their expectations and any potential barriers to use
- Design and test different wording and imagery to be used in marketing and promotion of the program
As the sole Experience Designer I lead the project through each phase as well as designing & facilitating the research approach, creating the ads to be tested and facilitating workshops along the way.
Output and outcomes
4 live, in-market experiments run, insights gathered from 3,000+ people in the target audience
Insights gathered from existing program users who were also in the new target market
New understanding of the best way to present and describe the program to the new target market
Read on for more details and depth.
This work is confidential so this example focuses on method and approach, I have included examples / artifacts where possible although these have been edited to maintain confidentiality.
The project
setting up for success
Originally tasked with facilitating a session to ideate a solution I was successfully able to re-point the workshop to give us the opportunity to re-examine the problem. After a (very) short introduction / refresh on HCD as an approach, I introduced exercises specifically designed to help us understand the problem from our target customers’ perspective.
These exercises enabled us to re-frame our problem with a customer-centred “How Might We” question.
research
I facilitated 10 generative qualitative 1:1 interviews with people in our target audience. There was a general understanding that we “didn’t know what we didn’t know” about our target audience so these interviews where designed to be exploratory.
A key member of the Health Coaching team was able to sit in on all the interviews as an observer and note-taker. As well as helping to deepen their understanding of HCD, it also gave them first hand experience of seeing qualitative research in action.
After the interviews we synthesised the findings creating summary Insight Statements. We also started to build a loose persona – our research showed us that there were important sub-sets within our target audience. Unable explore these sub-sets at this sage, I made sure to include their existence, and their unknowns, in the research summary.
As well as gaining a deeper understand of their wider life context and health needs, we got insight into their understanding and perception of what it meant to “be in good health.” From this we were able to create a persona for our new target market – for the purposes of this study they shall be referred to as “Persona X.”
Below is an extract of some of the insights that were gathered:
rapid experimentation
Calling on support from the Innovation team we formed a small team (including members of the Health Coaching team) we workshopped the core value proposition of our existing health coaching product as it related to Persona X. We also mapped out what we knew about our target customer using a business canvas.
From here we listed out all our assumptions and mapped them to identify our riskiest assumption. Our riskiest assumption was that Persona X will respond to a call to action and engage with our existing product.
From here we designed our rapid experimentation approach and our first experiment.
As our experiment included a sample of a real and current business offering we needed to ensure that everything was in place from an operational perspective. (This included things like creating process documents and flows, procedure documents, and delivery guidelines.) While our experiments were unbranded we were offering access to a real product so we worked with various internal teams, including Legal and Compliance to ensure that everything was approved and signed off.
The experiements
We A/B tested different ad copy and images alongside a call to action. Learning from each experiment we iterated and tested again narrowing down which ideas worked best with our target audience.
Here’s one of our early ads (I did the creative and the copy for the ads too):
and one of our early landing pages (I also did the copy and shared the creative design).
Impact / what happened next
In the latter stages of this project work was happening to evaluate and potentially introduce a new program / product offering within the Health Coaching team.
My secondment ended before the new program was introduced however it is my understanding that this work was used to inform the marketing of this new product offering.
(Additionally this project was paused in March ’20 due to capacity and availability issues resulting from the pandemic.)
Personal reflection
Business need V’s customer need
Working backwards to uncover the customer need for an existing business product that is looking for a new audience is tough. That said, I appreciate that sometimes that isn’t possible – figuring out a way to adapt a more traditional approach has been an interesting road and, whist I definitely prefer starting with the customer and understanding them and their needs, I’ve learnt to blend and flex a little more with methodology.
Which ad will win?
Getting to explore the world of experimentation again was fun! I really enjoyed the creativity involved in pulling together insights and intuition to help craft adverts and landing pages for the experiments.
Looking at the “what people actually did” results was exciting – we got to see which ads got the most clicks and then which resulted in the most conversions. Seeing our assumptions being proven and / or dis-proven provided lively conversations and helped to keep people engaged – which ad would “win”?
I acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands and waterways in which I work.
I pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging.