Assure Programs are an EAP (Employee Assistance Program) provider with branches around the country, employing over 60 full-time staff and thousands of on-call psychologists.
Founded in 1991, they are leaders in their field, providing EPA services to some of the largest enterprise corporations in Australia.
Assure hired me as a UX Designer/Frontend Developer to work with their head of Customer Experience to realise a complete digital transformation.
Assure's existing website was outdated and extremely difficult (nearly impossible), for their staff to update. This was the primary pain point as they needed to add/update information on the site regularly. The site was also not mobile friendly.
The second main pain point was access to the wealth of information that Assure had been developing and using in print format for years. They now wanted to put this online, to make it easier for their clients to access it.
The website also needed to provide controlled access to various different groups - individuals, managers, organisations, and associates (psychologists).
Human-centred-design (HCD) methodology was used as the basis of the transformation to create a completely new, responsive website - Assure Programs.
The new site provided easy access to all of the service collateral (at different levels) for Assure's staff and their clients. And staff were now able to update the site themselves without having any knowledge of web programming.
The project also included a web app - an interactive digital version of one of their main print resource.
One of the benefits to the business from these two products was a 12% reduction in call centre involvement.
There were three distinct groups that would be accessing the website and apps, which meant creating multiple personas to define the three main user journeys.
Unfortunately, Assure's online presence was very minimal, so we were unable to use Google Analytics, or any of the other online social media analysis tools, to help refine our customer personas. For this we had to rely solely on customer and internal staff interviews, focus groups, and data from some existing research.
Fortunately, due to the nature of their business, Assure already had a wealth of information about their customers, and their support staff were able to provide great insights to help with our initial affinity mapping.
There were a few challenges with this project, not the least of which was having the CEO involved in the process. This can be a good thing but often, as with this case, it requires a lot of work managing expectations.
As the product for this site was information/counselling, there was a fine line to be walked between directing the customer to the service without providing so much information that they didn't feel the need to finish the journey. There were also a range of legal, language and psychological issues to be taken into account.
The usual iterative prototype development ensued, and testing was continually conducted with internal and external users, ending with the website and app going live at the expected launch date.
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