Almost all of Healthline's 70M+ monthly visitors didn't recognize it as the site they visited for comprehensive and expert health information - let alone recommend it to others. It was clear Healthline needed to disrupt itself to increase it's NPS score and continue to grow.

Using Digital Data to Identify The Most Powerful "Who"

Healthline's potential user is almost everyone — from people who've had a serious illness to those researching the benefits of drinking orange juice - and over 200 different categories of health content to serve users whose views on health might be galaxies apart. So it's no surprise that they struggle deciding this: Who is the core customer best positioned to drive business growth?

We've spent years across more than a few companies to learn how to synthesize digital data for unique audience insights to uncover that most powerful segment. If you stick with the obvious choice of your largest segment or highest RPU, you'll miss out on a deeper understanding of growth drivers.

Using insights to drive more holistic design

After identifying Healthline's most valuable consumer and their core behavior, we had to translate their motivations into an emotional connection that made them stay longer, return more often, and recommend Healthline as a service.

Deliver brand cues to stir emotions and drive up relevance and recall
Create ease and comfort with subtle cues about trust and utility
Holistic design that addressed non-UX challenges of page speed and search

Mobile user = mobile testing

In order to embrace the fact that their core customer is primarily a mobile user, we worked with Healthline's product and engineering team to create a mobile-first A/B test plan based on mobile traffic splits. The test plan allowed us to understand the design impact of each page element with testing design across 10 different CMS templates and health categories. A variety of KPIs were tracked including sessions, clicks, revenue impressions, views on ads, plus NPS and customer satisfaction scores.

Results

Emotional engagement? Net promoter score increased by 181%. Ad revenue increased up to 70%. Sharing: +220%! For a 12 week schedule from concept to live test, we think that's pretty decent.

The insights about users were also quickly adopted and leveraged by Healthline's team of product managers and designers across multiple projects. We love that a collaborative process can quickly move entire teams to innovation across all parts of an organization.