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Unifying CVS Notifications

Overview

  • CVS was managing 130+ separate types of emails for their health services (MinuteClinic visits and Pharmacy visits)

  • I worked with a team of designers, content strategists, and product partners

  • We consolidated 130+ emails into 4 types of emails for 6 lines of business (24 emails total)

  • This case study is focused solely on confirmation emails (other notifications include reminder emails, cancellation emails, and SMS)

Skills

Design Team Management, Systems Thinking, Product Strategy, Negotiation Skills, Visual Design, User Experience Design, User Research, Usability Testing & Analysis

Time Frame

January-June 2023

Role

Experience Design Manager

  • I collaborated with our Product Director (Lauren Sheerr Beshears) and our Senior Design Lead (Jordan Williams) to strategize how to consolidate the emails

  • I reviewed and gave feedback on all designs and all content along the way for Stephanie Nguyen, James Quirk, Daree Allen-Nieves, and KC Skeldon

  • I gave Stephanie and James guidance when they were stuck or needed direction on next steps in our weekly 1:1s, feedback meetings, and email meetings

  • I analyzed usability testing results which validated our designs and content (and helped plan the testing plan prior with others)

Outcome

We set a strategy for consolidating the emails by identifying common sections, writing new content, and creating components to build the emails:

  • Consolidated 130+ email designs into 6 reusable templates in Figma (Design) and SalesForce Marketing Cloud (Engineering)

  • Created a new consistent messaging experience for customers in terms of branding, voice, and design (regardless of service or business area)

  • Decreased average time to make design/content adjustments to minutes rather than days for designers, content strategists, and engineers

  • Future emails can be designed, engineered, and deployed in hours compared to weeks using the new design system we created

Old and new email templates

Problem

Inconsistent branding, voice, and design across confirmation emails

There are many health services that CVS offers, each with their own types of services, and therefore types of emails:

  • MinuteClinic general care emails (digitally-scheduled, kiosk-scheduled, provider-scheduled)

  • MinuteClinic mental healthcare (digitally-scheduled, kiosk-scheduled)

  • Virtual Care emails (digitally-scheduled, provider-scheduled)

  • Virtual Primary Care emails (digitally-scheduled, provider-scheduled, on-demand related visit emails, scheduled visit emails)

  • COVID-19 testing emails (B2C, B2B)

  • Paxlovid emails

  • Hormonal Birth Control emails

  • Smoking Cessation emails

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Each of the lines of business above had several types of emails, each with their own design and voice. Even the confirmation emails for each service had variations depending on the patient's reason for visit, which complicates it further.

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This makes for an inconsistent experience for patients when receiving notifications from CVS, and makes it difficult for CVS teams to manage the content and design of the confirmation emails.

Current health service confirmation emails with different designs

Pictured above are examples of ​health service emails, all inconsistent in their design, content, and branding when compared to each other.

Strategy

How to consolidate confirmation emails

I worked closely with our Senior Design Lead, Jordan Williams, to break down the steps of how we could work towards consolidating the design and content of the emails, and then delegate it out to our team.

Strategy and timeline for unifying emails

We understood that in order to get to our goal, we needed to first gather all existing confirmation emails, identify common sections, create a new template, and then design new emails based on that template:

  1. Identify and create common email sections

    • Niveda (Product partner) gathers emails for all services​​

    • Stephanie (Experience Designer) reviews existing emails to identify common email sections (reviewed by me and Jordan)​​​

  2. Create email template​

    • James (Visual Design Lead) creates common email sections as individual components with variants in Figma (reviewed by me)​​

  3. Unify content for all emails based on the template and get approval​

    • Stephanie gathers current state dynamic content across each email section, and suggests unified content

    • Daree (Content Strategist) reviews and edits Stephanie's suggestions of unified content (reviewed by me, Jordan, and Jennifer [Content Manager])

    • Stephanie creates new consolidated emails using James's components and Daree's updated unified content

    • Jordan and I facilitate stakeholder reviews of the new emails

    • KC (Content Strategist) makes updates based on stakeholder reviews of the emails

    • Stephanie and I conduct usability testing for the emails to verify the designs and content

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We reviewed the plan with our Product and Engineering leadership to make sure it would fit with their timeline and we weren't missing anything.

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I planned out the tasks needing to be done for our 2-week sprints by working with James, Stephanie, and Daree to write stories, estimate the work, and time everything so it could be finished within 5 sprints.

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This took an entire quarter to execute, but our initial plan worked as everyone had a defined role that worked towards the goal.

Identify and create common email sections

Patterns of sections across all emails

After Niveda gathered all confirmation emails for every service, Stephanie identified common sections of the components and reviewed them with me and Jordan:

  • Email header

  • Email body

  • Confirmation code

  • Visit details section

    • Who the visit is for​

    • When

    • Where

    • Confirmation Code

  • What to bring​

  • Next steps / How to check in

  • COVID-19 precautions

  • Additional information

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She then identified within each section what common information and styles there were. Examples include:

  • Heading

  • Paragraph text

  • CTAs/Links

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With this set, Stephanie had a pattern for each part of a confirmation email, no matter the line of business or service type.

Email sections - Header, body, confirmation code, visit details

Creating the sections

Once Stephanie, Jordan, and I agreed on the email sections, Stephanie mocked up draft sections which included:

  • Elements of each section

  • Style of each element (size, weight, color)

  • CTAs within sections

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Pictured is the "Visit details" email section, which every confirmation email would need, regardless of the line of business or service type.

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With this, Stephanie had established the pattern for each email section we could use to create a template for our confirmation emails.

Visit details section broken down into headings, body text, and links

Create email template

Componentizing the common sections

Our Visual Design Lead, James Quirk, took Stephanie's common sections and created components for them in Figma.

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The difficult part that he and I worked through was creating components that contained all information that could possibly needed, but allow for less information if needed. Some visit types and health services required different information to be included in each section (for example, "Confirmation code" wasn't needed for Virtual Care visits, so that part of the component could be toggled off).

Variations of component sections

By building these components, James created a way for any designer to:

  • Pull the components from a new email library

  • Toggle the information needed for the section

  • Drag-and-drop the components to build an email

Confirmation email template

Stephanie and James's work allowed them to create a "Max View" Confirmation template.

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The template included all of the possible common sections that make up a confirmation email, using James's components.

 

This set us up to be able to insert the content we needed for each email type, along with being able to toggle on/off any section or part of a section that we needed to.

Unify content for all emails based on the template

Consolidating content for each email section

While James was working on creating the components, Stephanie gathered the content for each of the email sections.

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As an example, for the Email header component, the current content for each line of business and scenario differed:

  • "Your visit is scheduled"

  • "Your visit has been scheduled"

  • "Your new visit has been scheduled"

  • "You're in line! Learn what to expect as you wait"

  • "Here's what to expect."

Email header old content vs new content

While the content is slightly similar, it wasn't the same and didn't have the same tone across each email. Ensuring that each email header was consistent on the confirmation message made sure:

  • It's clear that the patient's visit is scheduled and confirmed (for in-person visits)

  • There are clear next steps (for virtual care visits)

  • Consistent content means CVS teams have less content to manage for multiple scenarios (if we had to make a change, we could change it for multiple emails if the content was the same, rather than all of them separately if the content was different).

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Daree took what Stephanie gathered and she consolidated what made most sense.

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In this case, Daree narrowed these 5 headers down to 2 headers:

  • "Your visit is scheduled" (in-person visits)

  • "Here's what to expect" (virtual visits)

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After Daree consolidated the content, I reviewed it with her manager, Jennifer, and Jordan to make sure we approved that the messaging met the goals. Daree did this consolidation for every email section that Stephanie identified.

Inserting content into the components

After I approved the content with Jennifer and Jordan, Stephanie plugged the content into James's components for each line of business.

Visit details component across lines of business

For example, the Visit Details component had minor differences depending on the line of business.

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MinuteClinic visits require a confirmation code, while virtual care and Pharmacy visits do not.

Get approval from stakeholders

Reviewing components with executive product director

Stephanie would tag me to review the components, and then I would loop in our Product Director, Lauren, to review the work from a business perspective to make sure we didn't miss anything.

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Based on Lauren's comments, I would make adjustments to the content myself, until everything was resolved. Jordan also helped during this process by making content adjustments as well.

Hormonal Birth Control visit email and Virtual Care visit email
Covid-19 test email and Smoking cessation visit email

Once Lauren approved of all of the components, Stephanie created the emails for each line of business. Pictured is the original emails next to the updated ones. The updated emails finally had consistent design and content.

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Jordan and I facilitated stakeholder reviews of the emails by either meeting directly with the business partners in charge of those lines of business or starting email threads. These stakeholders included Product partners, clinical partners, legal, security, and other business stakeholders.

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KC, our content strategist, would attend those meetings and make adjustments to the emails as needed.

Usability testing to get feedback and improve the emails

Prototype

Stephanie, KC, and I created a research study for the emails:

  • Goal: Validate email designs, content, and CTAs based on customer comprehension and expectations

  • Tasks:

    • Have patients view each email subject/preview and state their expectations of what the email will contain

    • When patients see the email, ask if their expectations were met and why

    • Ask what they see in the email and what they think they can do

    • Ask what they expect the CTAs do ("Start PreCheck-in," "Add to calendar," "Get directions," etc)

    • Ask what the purpose of the email is to test comprehension

Usability testing prototype including confirmation, 7-day, day-before, and T-120 reminder emails

Prototype of mailboxes, confirmation emails, and reminder emails was created by James and Stephanie.

Usability testing feedback

We submitted the test to usertesting.com and Stephanie took notes on all of the videos.

Usability testing feedback (2)

I did the analysis of the testing by reviewing notes for each question, drawing conclusions, and then matching the insights to our research goals and objectives.

Summary of email usability testing feedback

After testing and analyzing, we learned:

  • All participants understood the main purpose of each email

  • All participants said the emails have the right information, it matched their expectations, and nothing was missing

  • A majority of participants would use "Add to calendar," but had no expectation as to what it would do, which app it would open, or what information would be included in the invite

  • A few participants could not find the "reschedule/cancel" link, so we needed to make it more visible

  • Some participants confused "PreCheck-in" and "Check-in" which are two different processes

  • A few participants misunderstood the check-in process, thinking they could check-in before arriving to MinuteClinic, which is not how the process works

Usability testing feedback noting that check-in language was confusing
Usability testing feedback where people found reminders helpful

Stephanie and I put a presentation together and presented the findings to our design team, design leadership, Product leadership, architecture, and engineering.

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Next steps were to make adjustments based on learnings:

  • For MVP, remove "Add to calendar" and replace with the specific app, "Add to Google calendar" and "Add to Apple calendar"

  • Visually emphasize the "reschedule/cancel" link so participants can find it

  • Conduct a study on "PreCheck-in" and "Check-in" terminology to ensure participants understand what they're expected to do and know they have to be at the MinuteClinic to check in

Result

My team successfully executed on the strategy of consolidating confirmation emails:

  • Consistent design, branding, and content for 6 lines of business

  • Less content to manage for our team if changes come up

  • Better expectations for customers around confirmation of their visits and next steps

  • Validated through usability testing and approved by stakeholders

Old vs. new emails

Pictured are some examples of consolidated emails (each line of business has the former design and the new design next to it).

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