Background

NHS hospitals are severely understaffed and rely on doctors from abroad to help fill the vast number of open positions. There is a good pool of qualified candidates from India, however, doctors in India find the thought of moving to the UK daunting.

Indian doctors need reassurance that a move to the UK is not only good for their career, but also very achievable. NHS hospitals look to recruitment agencies to find foreign doctors, but the fees are very high and the candidates are not always placed successfully.

Doc2UK is a startup founded by UK doctors to connect UK hospitals with qualified doctors from India. The client had received significant interest from hospitals and wanted to launch a digital product. He hadn’t worked on digital products before, so shaping the product direction was as important as the final design.

Approach

Discovery

The client was an experienced NHS doctor that had relocated from India and was able to provide a great insight into the mindset of Indian doctors. I ran an introductory workshop to understand the mission of Doc2UK, and explore the high level as-is and target user journeys for the three user groups: Indian doctors, NHS hospitals and Doc2UK admin employees.

To provide context, I facilitated the creation of end to end user journeys: starting before interaction with Doc2UK through to starting a job in a UK hospital. This helped to understand user motivations and design a marketing website that would engage doctors and hospitals.

The core content for the marketing website was derived by matching the offering of the Doc2UK service with user goals. A quick exercise in information architecture and the website content and layout was decided.

Sketching and Design

I hand sketched wireframes for the recruitment platform and arranged them into a wireflow. Working with the client, I made some changes to the user flow and copy.

Doctors need several documents to complete their profile, but it’s unlikely they would have them all to hand on signup. The original design offered the option to ‘skip’ steps in the signup flow. However, the client suggested that in Indian culture, the idea of skipping a step made people feel uneasy. To mitigate this feeling, we included radio options for the doctor to indicate they were still working on getting a document and press ‘Continue’, rather than ‘Skip’.

Following sign-off, I created high fidelity digital mockups of the wireframes in Sketch. I also created a style sheet for Doc2UK and helped the client decide on branding and a logo.

The main design focus for the marketing website was writing copy that converts. To be able to write targeted copy, the homepage signposted users to landing pages for candidates or hospitals.

User testing

I verified the designs with three types of online user testing: question tests, preference versus competitors and usability testing. I wrote scripts and launched the tests on UsabilityHub and WhatUsersDo.

Users instantly understood the services provided by Doc2UK and described the website as ‘professional’, ‘helpful’, and ‘friendly’. Users preferred the Doc2UK website to competitor websites.

Users liked that profile registration was broken down into steps across separate pages. They said it was quick and simple to complete and especially appreciated that they could return to sections later, which should increase the conversion rate.

Deliverables

I designed a bespoke platform that aims to greatly reduce the time taken to fill open positions with doctors from abroad at a fraction of the cost of traditional recruitment agencies.

Doctors create an online profile in a series of guided steps with just-in-time help, making the process feel more achievable.

Administrators can use the client’s profile submission to create standardised profiles for candidates tagged with a doctor’s specialities and experience. Hospital users can search for candidates by specialities and experience, view their CVs on the platform and send enquiries.

The main design focus for the marketing website was writing copy that converts. To be able to write targeted copy, the homepage signposted users to landing pages for candidates or hospitals. The pages for Indian doctors enticed them with the benefits of moving to the UK and reassured them of relocation support. The pages for time-poor hospital staff presented the benefits of working with Doc2UK clearly and concisely.