How Banner Health Reached Consensus on Digital Strategy with Recurring UX Research

Last updated: November 25, 2025‍

Challenge: Differing Opinions on How to Improve Designs

80% of Alzheimer’s research studies are delayed because too few people sign up to participate. Banner Health has been on a mission to change this equation.

With over 50,000 employees, 30 hospitals, and 1 million customers, Banner is one of the largest hospital systems in the U.S. In 2006, the Phoenix-based nonprofit created the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute. The Institute’s 3 comprehensive memory care centers have revolutionized the standard of care for Alzheimer’s patients. The Institute has also been a leader in scientific collaborations and clinical trials. In 2016, Leslie Stahl featured the Institute’s innovative work in a 60 Minutes story, “The Alzheimer’s Laboratory”.

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One of the Institute’s top initiatives is Alzheimer’s prevention research. Recruiting for prevention studies is particularly challenging because you need participants with certain types of genes.

To combat this challenge, the team launched the Alzheimer’s Prevention Registry and signed up over 350,000 members. They developed partnerships with top Alzheimer’s research organizations. And they built a Find a Study portal to connect Registry members with Alzheimer’s research studies across the U.S. and online.

The Banner team wanted to see more members engaging with this portal and connecting with study sites. But, along with their design and development agencies, they were struggling to agree on the parts of Find a Study that required improvement and on how to improve them. Fortunately, they had a tool to guide them toward consensus.

Approach: Recurring User Research

Marketade worked with Banner and its design agency, Provoc, to create and implement a program of ongoing UX research. The multi-year program was built around 2 premises:

• A deep understanding of users and their problems — gained through interviews and observation — is the best foundation for improving the customer experience.
• All stakeholders on the team (including designers, developers, product owners, and management) must observe some of the research.

The centerpiece of the program was what we called the “participatory research session”: a 2-hour collaborative workshop where stakeholders reviewed significant chunks of the research and went through a process to reach consensus on problems and opportunities.

This approach is based on the premise that seeing is believing. There’s nothing like directly watching a user interact with your product, and struggling to achieve their real-world goals, especially after you’ve learned why this person is such a great fit for your product.

Studies lasted between 1 and 3 months. Here’s how the process worked for each study:

1. We met with stakeholders to review upcoming digital projects and decide on a topic for the study.
2. We teamed up with Banner to recruit representative participants for the study. The Registry has an engaged email list and monthly newsletter. We took advantage of that, along with their social media channels, to build a UX research panel of 125+ potential participants. For the typical study, we recruited 6-8 participants that met our criteria.
3. We scheduled and conducted 1:1 research sessions with participants. Most often these were a combination of semi-structured user interviews followed by usability testing or concept testing.
4. We condensed the full research video footage – typically 4 to 6 hours worth – to about 1 hour of highlight reels.
5. We ran a remote collaborative session with the extended team. We spent the 1st hour sharing findings and highlight reels. In the 2nd hour, we ran structured group exercises to prioritize the findings and generate solution directions.

Outcome: Team Alignment on Key Decisions & Directions

This recurring research program allowed the team to reach a consensus on strategy and design for a variety of initiatives and concepts.  These included a dashboard for study site researchers to manage their leads and participants and a dashboard for Registry members to track potential studies.

The Find a Study section was relaunched with a new design focused on solving the 3 barriers identified in a collaborative session.  Prior to that research session, it felt like the list of issues to tackle with Find a Study were endless. Watching users go through the search experience allowed the group to quickly get on the same page regarding the biggest problems worth solving.