Case Study 06 — HCA Healthcare

Website Experience for HCA Healthcare

Client

HCA Healthcare

Role

Design Lead / Researcher / Workshop Lead

No redesign since 2016. Years of uncoordinated stakeholder edits left a fractured, patchwork site — outdated content, broken navigation, no shared sense of purpose. A platform migration created the forcing function: redesign it, align internally, and build the governance to keep it from fragmenting again.

Years Since the Last Redesign

Years of uncoordinated stakeholder edits

No shared governance model

A platform migration as the forcing function

Research

31 interviews. Surveys from 70+ physicians and nurses. Seven personas.

A team of six designers and researchers ran 31 one-on-one interviews with potential patients, reviewed survey responses from more than 70 physicians and nurses, and gathered input from a dozen business leaders and investors — all within a few weeks. Clustering and affinity mapping produced seven grounded personas that gave the whole team a shared language.

HCA research synthesis Miro board of survey and interview data

Research · Surveys & Interviews

Nurse · Sarah

Physician · Tom

HCA family-centered searcher patient persona — Carrie

Patient · Carrie

Investor · John

HCA tech-savvy wellness seeker patient persona — Danielle

Patient · Danielle

HCA frugal skeptic patient persona — Rob

Patient · Rob

Business · Aisha

Artifact

The most significant finding was one nobody expected.

An analytics deep-dive with HCA's Marketing Services team mapped what people were actually looking for and where they dropped off. A substantial share of traffic was people hunting for career content — buried several levels deep. They were finding it despite the site, not because of it. That reframed the whole priority list.

HCA analytics dashboard for patient traffic

Analytics · Patients

HCA analytics dashboard for nurse traffic

Analytics · Nurses

HCA analytics dashboard for physician traffic

Analytics · Physicians

"A substantial share of the site's traffic was people hunting for career content, buried several levels deep. They were finding it despite the site, not because of it."

— from the analytics deep-dive

The Conflict

Working outside HCA's own UX team.

HCA already had an internal UX team, focused on a repeatable design system for a large network of clinics and hospitals. This project sat outside that scope from the start — a public-facing redesign that began as a sales-focused pitch and grew into something that needed real weight once the career-content finding surfaced. Working outside their department made the internal team understandably hesitant to bring an outside consultant in. That changed once we produced working templates that were simply better than what they already had. Once the improvement was visible instead of argued for, the door opened.

HCA stakeholder workshop with the team sorting ideas on whiteboards

The Workshop · Four Hours, Seven Personas, One Room

Approach

A shared vocabulary, built in the open.

I facilitated a four-hour workshop walking stakeholders through all seven personas, running How Might We exercises against each persona's pain points, then live-sorting the resulting ideas into three buckets — Now, Later, and "someone else's cheese" — with group dot-voting driving the prioritization.

In parallel, I ran an independent heuristics analysis against Nielsen's ten usability principles — then held learning sessions with HCA's own engineers to explain what heuristics are and how to apply them. The deliverable mattered, but the knowledge transfer mattered more.

Artifact

Three directions, presented to leadership for input.

Grounded in the research and guided by the personas, the team produced three distinct directions — low-fi wireframes through mid-fidelity visual explorations — before landing on a serious modernization that stayed inside HCA's style guide.

HCA design direction 1, low-fidelity wireframe

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Direction 01

HCA design direction 2, low-fidelity wireframe

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Direction 02

HCA design direction 3, mid-fidelity visual exploration

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Direction 03

The Design — "We Show Up"

Modernized, without losing HCA's warmth.

A modernized homepage balancing patient, provider, and investor needs within HCA's existing style guide — a serious step forward that still feels unmistakably HCA.

HCA redesigned homepage, full page — the winning We Show Up direction

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Hi-Fi · Selected Direction — "We Show Up"

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Nurses · Landing Page

HCA redesigned nursing careers subpage, full page

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Nurses · Subpage

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Patients · Landing Page

HCA redesigned physician landing page, full page

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Physicians · Landing Page

Outcome

From assumption-based to evidence-based design.

The project delivered a research-validated, stakeholder-aligned foundation — interactive prototypes, a new IA, and the governance to keep things from fragmenting again. The lasting outcome was bigger: HCA moved from assumption-based web management to evidence-based design. The career-content finding is the clearest example — nobody would have guessed it. It came from data and listening.

One-on-One Patient Interviews

70+

Physicians & Nurses Surveyed

Personas, One Shared Language

That's the full set of case studies.

Back to Selected Work for the rest of the portfolio.

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