When redesigning your public facing website whether you are a healthcare provider or payer, there are a number of key factors to consider on where to focus your efforts to ensure you’re giving consumers-patients-members the best digital experience. As it only takes about 0.05 seconds[1] for users to form an opinion about your website that determines whether they like your site or not, whether they’ll stay or leave – you don’t have long to create a great first impression.
Not only are first impressions important, if the overall experience doesn’t meet the users needs, 88%[2] of online consumers are less likely to return to a website after a bad experience. It’s imperative to offer a satisfactory or even delightful digital experience the first time.
In order for your redesign to be as successful as possible it’s important you start by understanding what your audience wants. Luckily you can glean this information across a number of different methods. Prior to starting your redesign you should understand what challenges are being experienced by your key audience(s) in your current website.
You can leverage the below to help uncover where current issues exist that should be tackled in the website redesign.
- Website polls
- Conduct interviews or focus groups with your target audience personas
- Review your website analytics data
Once you know where the problems exist on your current site exist, you can start to problem solve. If you are conducting website polls, interviews or focus groups it’s useful to ask follow up questions that can give you a starting point on how to resolve the problem.
Once you have identified items to add to your product backlog, you can meet with your UX, design and development teams to talk through the requirements you have. Once you have some initial concepts developed, start some initial A/B tests to hypothesize certain test cases and see how consumers-patients-members respond before starting development for the redesign.
This way you move forward with a solution that performs better than where your site currently stands rather than launching a redesigned website unclear of performance until post go-live.
Offering positive digital experiences for the features that are commonly used by your key audience(s) as well as focusing on design and aesthetics is where you should predominantly focus your efforts. It’s known that 38%[3] of people will stop engaging with a website if the content or layout are unattractive. Furthermore, 75%[4] of consumers admit to making judgements on a company’s credibility based on the company’s web design.
Here are some key considerations to take into account when tackling your healthcare website redesign:
- Communicate your value proposition and key products and services in an engaging, concise manner instead of lengthy chunks of text. Leverage a simple, clean design to lift the copy so it is beautifully presented on the page.
- Determine which essential common features your site needs and do these exceptionally well. Make sure the user experience is intuitive and design is clutter-free so it is easy for the target audience to complete specific actions. Some of these key features may include:
- Find a Doctor
- Location finder
- Shop for insurance
- Contact information
- Online appointment scheduling
- Resources for patients and visitors
- Staff directory
- Your consumers-patients-members want to have actions to complete – after all they have come to your website with a specific need. It’s important to offer a Call to Action (CTA) on every webpage of your site so it’s clear what the next steps are.
- Ensure your website has a logical flow support your target audience in navigating your site.
- Offer a consistent look and feel across various areas of the website so consumers-patients-members can quickly get familiar with your site and not have to relearn where to find key information.
Leveraging the above considerations will ensure you’re adopting best practices in your website redesign. Its important to continue user testing throughout the development process and usability testing is a great way to ensure you have feedback on the approach you’ve taken and ensure opportunities are identified to refine and improve prior to launch.
Good luck in your website redesign efforts! I’d love to hear your feedback on where you’ve experienced the most success with your site redesign efforts.
Sources:
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01449290500330448
[2] https://www.invisionapp.com/blog/statistics-on-user-experience/
[3] https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/compelling-stats-website-design-optimization-list
[4] Web credibility research by Stanford http://credibility.stanford.edu/guidelines/index.html
