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Emerald Health Cannabis

Design Research | Personas |

Customer Journey Development | Content Strategy

Challenge

Emerald Health is a licensed producer of medical and recreational cannabis, based out of British Columbia. I began working on the Emerald Health account in the spring of 2018 in preparation for legalization, to ensure that the brand would continue to support the needs of its medicinal customers while also positioning themselves as a player within the recreational cannabis landscape post-legalization. 

User Interviews

I conducted 24 one-on-one interviews with participants across Canada who self-identified as recreational users or medicinal users.

Research Objectives:

  1. Understand why some users switch from treating illness/pain with pharmaceutical medication to medical cannabis.

  2. Learn how users obtained a prescription and chose a licensed producer.

  3. Understand how users decide what products to order, and their experiences shopping online and getting deliveries.

  4. Reveal consumption habits, including time of day, dosing and catering strain to symptom.

  5. Discover attitudes to legalization in Canada.

Live_session_with_Rose_L__Williams____Lo

Responsibilities: 

  • Identified participant criteria

  • Wrote screener for recruitment

  • Wrote research brief & interview guide

  • Moderated in-person and remote interviews

Deliverables:

  • Screener (PDF)

Synthesis

I went through the notes for each interview and used Milanote to begin pulling out themes from the research. From there, I used the research findings to create the personas & journey maps.

Emerald_Medicinal_User_Research_-_Milano

Personas

Customer Journey Map - Medical User

Medical User Journey.png

Medical User Journey Map (PNG)

Content Strategy for Website Redesign

As part of preparation for legalization, the Emerald Health website was re-platformed to a new CMS and redesigned to reflect the latest brand style guide.

Responsibilities

  • Leveraged findings and pain points from the persona and customer journey work to create a list of new content opportunities.

  • Worked with the client to prioritize content opportunities and create two new site maps which aligned to the two-phased launch schedule of the new site.

Emerald Health - Before

The previous site consisted of a simple e-commerce platform to support online sales for customers with a prescription for medical cannabis, and was otherwise light on supplementary content.

Emerald Care - Current Site Map.png

Emerald Health - After

The redesigned site included new content that addressed opportunities identified through generative research to engage and improve the user experience across all of Emerald's touchpoints and channels.

Emerald Health - Redesigned Landing Page

​New Content:

  1. A new ’Learn’ section, to introduce potential consumers to the different types of medical cannabis products, the endocannabinoid system, terpenes, associated medical & wellness benefits, dosage guidelines & different ways to consume.

  2. A new ‘Our Difference’ section, to differentiate Emerald from other licensed producers by telling the story of their scientific & innovation capabilities, including their pharmaceutical developments, growing process and production facilities.

  3. A new ‘Physicians’ section exclusively for doctors, with content on patient criteria, prescription guidelines and dosage recommendations.

Emerald Health - Phase 1 Site Map.png
Emerald Health - Phase 2 Site Map.png
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