Compared with other industries, health care has been slow to incorporate consumer feedback into product development. However, Care Innovations, a joint venture between Intel and GE, saw an opportunity to involve family caregivers and make them active participants in the innovation process. In 2014, the company began developing Health Harmony, an online platform that helps patients, their families and physicians share health data and educational information, but found itself divided on critical issues of product development: which features would family caregivers find most valuable on the homepage, and how should the interface look and feel?

To answer these questions, Care Innovations’ internal engineering team, an outside agency and other stakeholders gathered all previously proposed homepage designs, as well as a wide range of other alternatives. These alternatives included different combinations of design elements such as colors, logo and fonts, as well as different structural elements such as navigation. In the end, the team tested 1,860 unique design alternatives among hundreds of caregivers to identify the most widely preferred design and help prioritize features for future development. The optimized homepage layout generated a 183% lift in caregiver preference over the pre-optimized version and outperformed all competitor layouts tested.