The Healios homepage
Rewriting client comms for a health tech company
Reducing user frustration, staff overwhelm and operational costs
Who is Healios?
Healios is an online mental health, autism and ADHD service provider for young people and families.
I was the sole UX writer at Healios from July 2022 to August 2023.
Project overview
The problem
An internal report found that our clients cancelling or not attending their sessions was having a large negative impact on Healios operations.
The report highlighted the quality of Healios communications as a likely cause of clients' lack of engagement.
I led the project to rework our client communications and collaborated with stakeholders across the business.
Our goal
The goal of this project was to improve the emails and SMS sent to our clients.
Specifically we wanted to...
Reduce the volume of calls and emails to the client support team
Reduce the number of sessions where the client cancelled or didn't attend
Increase clients' satisfaction
Project details
The process
Several steps were necessary to successfully complete the project:
Discovery - Understanding client journeys and the comms they receive
Ideation - Collaborating with stakeholders on changes to be made
Writing - Writing and rewriting based on stakeholder feedback
Testing - Gathering user feedback and testing for errors before going live
My documentation included tracking each change made and why
Changes made to client communications
The changes I made can be broken into five categories:
Implementing progressive disclosure
Improving readability
Fixing errors
Preventing user error
Improving operations
More specifically, the changes I made included...
Fixing spelling, grammar and punctuation errors
Improving visual hierarchy
Paying attention to tone of voice
Using clear language to reducing ambiguity*
Giving each email one purpose to focus on
Moving supplementary information to landing pages
Surfacing relevant information at the right time — not too early, not too late
*This item was especially important considering the main audience is autistic individuals (and their families) who do best with clarity and certainty.
These changes were also made to SMS
Most automated emails also had a corresponding SMS that was sent to the client at the same time.
Rewriting the SMS had an additional challenge as I was tasked with reducing the length of each SMS. This is because, when sent, each SMS is broken down into sections, and Healios is charged by the number of sections sent.
The changes to SMS length alone was estimated to save £600/mo in operational costs.
The client journey was complicated with many different pain points
Example of a rewritten email
The welcome email before changes were made
The welcome email was originally a whopping 600+ words
Too much information was packed into the email, especially for the first piece of correspondence clients received from us.
Clients were consistently confused, overwhelmed and frustrated by this email in particular.
The rewritten welcome email focused on the most important details, reducing it to 111 words
Project outcomes
I'm pleased to share that we had a great outcome from updating the client communications.
We had...
fewer clients cancelling or not attending sessions
a reduction in clients calling or emailing the support team
positive feedback from the client support team and stakeholders
minimum £600/mo reduction in operation costs