Enhancing Thriva’s digital experience in just a few months

The challenge

Thriva is an online wellbeing and health tracking service. They wanted to make it easier for customers to access clinical information in their Health Hub, while developing a new suite of pages for their B2B audience.

As a growing start up, they need results quickly. Our designers and technical specialists worked collaboratively with their team to integrate a new B2C ‘Health Hub’ within their CMS, improving site navigation and user interface.

Unboxed delivered 3 key outcomes:

• increasing traffic and conversions to Health Hub by improving architecture and navigation
• Customer Service teams are able to update email templates across the business without the need for developer support
• new business growth supported by a clear B2B offer, articulated within an easy to navigate microsite

Background

Organic traffic to Thriva Health Hub content had been growing steadily. However, they knew there was an opportunity to grow even more. While they’d created their Health Hub early on, they knew they needed to invest in further development now their market was growing. They now have over 100 articles online (expert-led content designed for customers who are concerned about their health and wellbeing). Thriva wanted to make it easier for customers to navigate this content and establish a content framework that could handle a growing volume of topic areas.

They also wanted to increase efficiency in their email communications. They were using templates stored in Rails, using the Sendgrid API to send transactional communications to customers (purchase confirmations, for example). But they found that updating email templates could be time consuming and didn’t offer their Customer Service teams the flexibility to test and roll out new templates quickly across the business. Only developers could change templates, pulling engineering time from other product development.

Finally, Thriva were exploring several exciting B2B offers, including diagnostic, remote screening, logistics and clinical advice. They needed to help both craft a distinct proposition that would appeal to diverse markets.

Thriva brand attributes for B2B:

Our approach

We put together an adaptable team that could work cohesively across 3 projects:

• Health Hub design and build
• Email template improvements
• B2B content design

Unboxed brought 3 developers, 2 service and UX designers, a content designer and a delivery manager to work with Thriva’s content and engineering teams.

Having a shared team working across projects meant that we could ensure consistency in how we delivered the front end.

Health Hub

We worked closely with Thriva’s front and back end developers for code review and for support with their complex development environment. Our brief was to make it easier for customers to find Health Hub content and improve journeys to the core Thriva offer. The hub was built using Prismic, a headless CMS, and the javascript framework Vue.js - our team quickly got to grips with the Prismic functionality and components, then worked alongside their content leads to understand how an improved Health Hub could meet the needs of both the business and customers. With a few weeks, we delivered:

• simpler content navigation and topic grouping, to direct customers to multiple articles that could address their health concerns
• ability for content editors to add or change content
• new search function and browsing navigation, to get customers to relevant articles faster
• eye-catching, accessible and fast loading new designs for core hub components

Email templates

Thriva offers a transactional service to customers - people can order testing and supplements online, receive these in the post and then get regular clinical advice based on their personal health profile. They send out multiple emails to customers, for example, to confirm dispatch of an order.

Yet these emails were time consuming and difficult to change. A content editor had to log a new request with the engineering team even to make a small change to styling or copy. The Thriva team wanted to make it easier and quicker for content and marketing teams to maintain consistent brand and messaging across their communications, without using up design and engineering resources.

Our developers worked with Thriva to create dynamic email templates within Sendgrid and integrate them with their Rails back end. This means that content editors can make quick updates in real time, without having to involve other teams.

B2B website

While part of our team worked on the Health Hub, 2 other designers joined to focus on creating a compelling proposition for business to business customers. As an ambitious scale up, Thriva was exploring multiple markets and diverse customer groups, from research institutions to large employers to small health practitioners. This gave us an exciting challenge - how do we create a simple and clear offer that resonates with these different audiences?

We started by introducing content design principles to the team. Their marketing lead was highly experienced in brand and marketing, but keen to learn about how we could use design methodology to excite and engage new business partners.

Working alongside the Operations Director, we ran a sketching workshop with the client team to map out the decision making journey for B2B customers. We include lightning demos from competitor websites to prompt thinking around what could work for Thriva. These quick visual examples often prompt immediate, emotional responses and help us learn about the client’s beliefs - what they like, what they don’t like, what jars with their values

At the same time, we carried out desk research and reviewed the research that Thriva had already done around key drivers for their B2B audiences. We set out user needs and broke these down into smaller user stories, for example:

Next up was the information architecture. We used simple blocking in Miro to set out typical customer journeys through the website. This helped us draft a site map which we shared with the team for feedback.

With those building blocks in place, we were able to build the core content blocks:

• clear value proposition (what is Thriva offering)
• communicating credibility (testimonials and clients)
• reassurance (showing that Thriva understands their market)
• product features and benefits
• calls to action

Before designing the content, we needed to ensure that the B2B site reflected the Thriva voice. They had a well established brand guidelines and tone of voice for B2C content, but had not yet developed this for the B2B market. We used a short collaborative workshop to develop a ‘voice chart’ - a set of principles and core concepts that the B2B voice should communicate. This helped inform our language choice and key messaging.

We went back to our user stories and mapped these against our core concepts. This helped us build a content plan that set out where content would sit, what components were needed (words, imagery, graphics) and what content needed to do for the user. Through a playback session, we explained our decision-making and invited feedback from senior stakeholders. Then we could start iterating content within the user interface (UI).

The outcome

In just a few months, we delivered several outcomes that enhanced the experience for both internal users and customers:

• an attractive, easy to navigate Health hub including new index page, search functionality, topic pages and consistent pages templates.
• integration of their Rails application with Sendgrid email templates, reducing the resource involved in customising email template and allowing the Growth team to update designs quickly across all service emails.
• a new B2B microsite including design template, information architecture, a clear narrative and new components to make it easier to promote different features, such as the Thriva API

Beyond the project

By embedding our designers and developers within the Thriva team, we helped to upskill their people in design-led approaches, giving them new skills to continue to evolve their digital interface. For example, by working closely with their Marketing team and involving them in the content design process, we gave them the confidence to use content design methodology in building up their B2B site beyond the project.

By working closely with their engineering team as we designed the Health Hub and new components, we ensured that they understood the design decisions behind these interfaces and that these components could be integrated into their libraries for future use.