Customer Journey and UX Design
In 2013, I joined a senior-level creative task force at Cibo in San Francisco to completely overhaul the Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital digital experience. The assignment came with immense structural complexity: the hospital was undergoing a major physical renovation while simultaneously exploring a new brand identity and logo with a partner agency.
The Challenge
The legacy website was heavily saturated with content, clinical research, and dense information—leaving users completely overwhelmed. We were tasked with architecting a brand-new customer journey that would drastically streamline the user experience for both referring physicians and families. The strategic goal we set for ourselves was to take visitors from concerned to confident.
The Emotional Core
Our target audience was the parents and family members that were being referred to the hospital with nothing but a very scary diagnosis for their young children. To help serve them the information they needed—plus a big dose of hope—we developed a website visually rich with success stories front and center when visitors arrived at the site. We wanted to give them the reassurance that their children were going to be in the very best hands.
The Innovation
To ensure these families could surface critical resources instantly without getting buried in deep navigation, I spearheaded a vital UX feature: a smart predictive search bar.
By mapping out a dense, intuitive content taxonomy behind the scenes, this functionality allowed even the most novice user to type in a raw diagnosis, and the search feature would predictively return beautifully categorized results—instantly surfacing specific clinical services, treating physicians, location data, and relevant articles in a single action. While this level of predictive search is commonplace today, at the time, it represented a major shift in user experience design.
The Lasting Impact
The client loved how this smart bar simplified a high-stress user journey. What I am proudest of is the longevity of the solution: while the overall website design and visual interface have naturally been refreshed and updated over the years, the core smart bar framework and the rich content taxonomy we developed remain a vital, untouched part of the hospital’s digital presence today.
