Restructuring a Healthcare Directory for Clarity + Growth
Project Overview
Client
Accredited Home Healthcare Directory (AHHD)
Sector
Healthcare, Social Good
Timeframe
June 2023 - Present (Phase 4 in progress)
My Role
UX Design | Research | Information Architecture
Team
Solo UX Desinger partnering with Founder; consulted with former IT collaborator
Tools
Google Workspace, Figma, Miro, Wix, Velo by Wix, HubSpot, ChatGPT
The Accredited Home Healthcare Directory (AHHD) connects individuals and families with accredited home healthcare, home care, and hospice care providers across the United States.
The founder’s goal was clear: make it easy, trustworthy, accessible, and always free to use.
I partnered with AHHD to redesign the website’s structure, streamline updates, improve accessibility, and plan for future automation and growth.
View the live site: Accredited Home Healthcare Directory
Understanding the Problem
Choosing the right home care can be overwhelming. For the Accredited Home Healthcare Directory, finding care options needed to feel trustworthy, accessible, and easy to navigate.
Through a heuristic evaluation of the site’s structure and pages, combined with founder interviews, I surfaced key friction points that could limit user trust, increase cognitive load, and impact accessibility:
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Manual listing updates created delays and risked inconsistencies.
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Non-scalable directory structure made it difficult to expand or automate.
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Navigation based on state abbreviations increased cognitive load.
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Accessibility barriers (such as low contrast and unclear labeling) limited the experience for low-vision and screen reader users.
While I did not conduct user testing at this stage, the issues aligned with established usability and accessibility standards. These gaps indicated likely challenges for real users, especially those making urgent care decisions under stress.
Annotated screenshot featuring key takeaways from heuristic analysis of the existing site's home page.
Annotated screenshot featuring key takeaways from heuristic analysis of the existing state pages.
Why Accreditation Matters
In parallel with addressing usability, I sought to reflect the founder’s mission: making accredited care more visible and accessible.
The Accredited Home Healthcare Directory was created to help people find care options that routinely meet rigorous quality standards. Accreditation requires independent evaluations, proven safety practices, and adherence to best care delivery benchmarks, offering users a trusted signal of quality and oversight.
Although no system can fully prevent harm, accredited providers undergo regular external checks, making unsafe practices harder to overlook and reducing the risk for families navigating care decisions.
Accredited organizations consistently demonstrate stronger management practices, higher quality of care, and greater staff engagement, which are critical indicators of safer and more reliable services.
▸ Research Insight
Accreditation Signals Quality and Builds Trust
While these studies were conducted in a variety of healthcare systems, they point to a consistent global trend: accreditation supports safer, more reliable care.
For people navigating difficult decisions about home-based services, accreditation offers a level of trust, consistency, and oversight that non-accredited options may lack.
A literature review analyzing 11 studies across countries including the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom found that hospital accreditation leads to improved quality outcomes (54.54%), stronger management practices (81.81%), and increased staff participation in quality initiatives (27.27%).
My Approach
Learning the Current Workflow
To start, I conducted a contextual interview with the founder to understand how she gathered and managed directory data.
Watching her work in real time revealed hidden friction: manually copying and formatting information from accrediting body websites into a spreadsheet that was not structured for automation.
The process was time-consuming, required heavy manual checking, and increased the risk of formatting errors or missing information.
Snapshot of the ACHC provider search tool, used by the founder to manually look up accredited care listings. This real-time observation highlighted the repetitive nature of the process and the opportunity to streamline future updates.
✦ Breakthrough Moment
Unlocking the Power of Structured Data
"It's a very time-consuming process."
- Cindy Rogers, Founder of Accredited Home Healthcare Directory
During a contextual interview, I observed how difficult and tedious it was for Cindy to maintain the site. This process was not just slow, but ultimately unsustainable. The insight helped reframe the project around creating systems that reduce manual effort and support her long term without requiring technical skills.
Surfacing Hidden Friction
While reviewing the spreadsheet system, I uncovered deeper challenges:
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Mixed fields that combined contact info, accreditation details, and notes into a single cell.
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No consistent distinction existed between public-facing and internal-only data.
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Listings had to be manually re-verified before publishing, creating redundant work.
Original spreadsheet example showing how several fields contained multiple pieces of information in one cell, making automation difficult.
▸ Research Insight
Helping Users Focus on What Matters Most
When people are searching for care, especially for a loved one, they shouldn’t have to pause to interpret unfamiliar terms. On the original site, elements like the use of “PHN” to indicate phone number caused unnecessary hesitation. Similarly, relying on state abbreviations in navigation added cognitive effort for users who were unfamiliar with postal codes or searching across state lines.
To reduce this friction, I focused on making language and layout more intuitive. I applied consistent formatting, familiar terminology, and visual patterns that supported recognition rather than requiring interpretation.
“Minimize the user's memory load by making elements, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the interface to another.”
These refinements helped users move through the site with greater ease and allowed them to stay focused on what matters most: finding trustworthy, accredited care.
Structuring for Long-Term Sustainability
To reduce manual lift and prepare the system for non-technical volunteer maintenance, I transitioned the directory to a no-code, CMS-powered structure.
Before:
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Updates required emailing Excel files back and forth, risking outdated versions.
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Manual page edits made maintaining 50+ state pages extremely tedious.
After:
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A collaborative Google Sheet allowed multiple collaborators to work seamlessly.
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Each listing was dynamically populated based on structured fields: Business Name, City, Phone Number, and Website URL.
Listings were now organized alphabetically by city within each state, with full state names shown for clarity (instead of abbreviations).
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A visual overview showing how combined data fields were split into structured columns and connected to CMS output.
Backend view of the CMS setup. Each listing pulls from a standardized spreadsheet, with fields like Business Name, City, Phone, and Website mapped to display automatically on the listing tiles.
Evolving the Homepage to Prioritize Action and Purpose
To support a more user-centered experience, I prioritized changes that simplified the visual hierarchy, refocused the homepage messaging, and prepared the site for future search enhancements.
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Cleaned up visual hierarchy, reducing sponsored content prominence
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Minimized ad sizing following standard leaderboard proportions
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Reframed top-level messaging to clearly state site purpose ("Find accredited home care, home healthcare, and home hospice providers")
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Moved secondary content (Healthcare Heroes, affiliate spotlights) lower in the visual order
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Introduced Find Care by Location as a next phase — moving search functionality directly to the top of the homepage for easier access
Early iterations cleaned up the hierarchy. Future versions will bring the Find Care by Location feature directly to the top of the homepage for even faster navigation.
Interactive prototype comparing the Accredited Home Healthcare Directory before and after redesign updates. Explore how content organization, navigation, and visual hierarchy were improved to better support users searching for accredited home-based care.
Planning for Findability and Scalability
Understanding that many users search for care across unfamiliar regions, I designed a future-state concept for searching by zip code, city, or interactive map.
Meanwhile, I cleaned up interim navigation:
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Simplified top-level menu to direct users immediately to Find Care.
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Consolidated all state page links onto one master page, eliminating the need for updates across 51+ separate pages when changes occur.
Redesigned with a clearer hierarchy and user-centered structure, this view shows the full Find Care page, featuring the new location-based search tool, simplified navigation, and improved content visibility.
Early concept sketch showing the future integration of the "Find Care" functionality directly onto the homepage using a zip code and location-based map search feature.
Improving Accessibility for All Users
Accessibility improvements were embedded into every redesign decision:
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Color contrast improved dramatically (from 2.5:1 to 11.86:1 for text on non-white backgrounds).
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Typography updated to reduce eye strain and improve readability.
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Heading structure and focus order corrected for screen reader users.
Measured Results (Homepage):
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Color contrast violations reduced by 80%
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Alt text errors reduced by 71%
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Heading hierarchy errors reduced by 89%
To measure progress, I conducted homepage accessibility scans (via AudioEye audits) at key milestones. The table below summarizes the improvements made between Phase 1 and Phase 4, reflecting measurable reductions in critical usability barriers.
Accessibility improvements between Phase 1 and Phase 4 of the homepage redesign, reflecting a measurable reduction in critical barriers for screen reader users, keyboard navigators, and low vision users.
Accessibility audits will continue as new CMS-driven content and dynamic features are added to the broader site.
Laying the Groundwork for Future Growth
While solving immediate usability issues, I also planned a phased roadmap to support future scalability:
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Integrate dynamic location-based search and interactive map features.
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Consolidate listings into one CMS collection for simpler maintenance.
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Build a scraping tool to refresh listings automatically based on updated accreditation records.
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Automate flagging of incomplete or outdated entries for easier volunteer management.
High-level overview of project phases, from early content and accessibility improvements through long-term automation and dynamic location-based search planning.
Key Outcomes
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Increased homepage accessibility scores by up to 84% across critical areas, improving usability for low-vision users, screen reader navigation, and general readability.
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Simplified site maintenance by implementing a CMS-fed system connected to a standardized Google Sheet, reducing manual updates and ensuring consistency across listings.
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Repositioned the Find Care functionality to streamline navigation, reduce cognitive load, and support a clearer user journey when selecting state-specific care options.
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Laid the foundation for future enhancements, including an interactive map integration, automated data scraping, and dynamic search features to further scale and support user needs.
Together, these improvements not only enhanced the site's usability and maintainability but also strengthened its foundation for future growth, automation, and user-centered innovation.
Client Testimonial
"Jay has shown an exceptional ability to make our website easier to use and more accessible to everyone[...] He made it much simpler for users to find the care they need while making the site more intuitive. One of the most impressive things Jay did was plan for future improvements, like adding a map feature on the home page. This will make it even easier for users to quickly find information based on their location."
- Cindy Rogers, Founder, Accredited Home Healthcare Directory (Upwork, August 2024)
How This Project Strengthened My UX Practice
Working on the Accredited Home Healthcare Directory deepened my understanding of how to design scalable, user-centered systems within strict real-world constraints.
This project strengthened my ability to:
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Prioritize accessibility improvements early through heuristic evaluation, even without user testing resources.
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Plan scalable CMS and content structures that reduce manual workload and support long-term growth.
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Align UX decisions with user needs and operational realities, including maintaining the platform with an all-volunteer team rather than hired contractors.
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Create systems that are easy for new contributors to use, while protecting the platform from errors and maintaining quality control.
Unlike previous projects I had worked on, which often had small budgets for contractors or technical support, this was a true $0 budget project. Designing for zero budget challenged me to think differently about sustainability, contribution models, and system resilience — skills I continue to carry forward into new projects.
What's Next
With the core improvements live, the next phases will focus on:
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Embedding dynamic map-based search.
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Launching a scraping tool to automatically refresh listings.
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Completing user testing and SME validation to further refine the search experience.
Final Reflections
This project reinforced my commitment to designing not just for today's user experience, but for systems that can grow, adapt, and stay reliable over time. It also deepened my passion for creating low-budget solutions that empower independent business owners and organizations with limited resources, ensuring that high-quality, accessible design is within reach for those who need it most.