Marketing & Strategic Communications

Website Redesign

The Challenge

Patients’ primary reasons for visiting our website are to easily find services, search providers, or find directions to a clinic. Over the past decade, the sudden rise of smartphones resulted in increased web visits taking place on a mobile device. Further, technologies like responsive design have tailor the site visitor’s experience regardless of device. As UI Health Marketing saw the number of mobile web visits increase, it recognized that the site — originally designed in 2009 — was not positioned to best serve patient needs, nor to meet their changing expectations on the web. Redesigns and rebuilding the website became a top priority.

The Process

The strategy and research components of project included nearly 20 focus group and stakeholder interviews, primary-audience interviews, provider- and patient-focused surveys, peer reviews, and workshops with the UI Health Patient & Family Advisory Council that resulted in three major goals:

1. Patient-focused design
2. Improve Find A Doctor and Appointment Request action items
3. Improve technology and operations

With goals established, the Marketing team moved forward with creating usability wireframes to determine priority and functionality of main content areas. The wireframes and draft designs were exposed to a mix on onsite patients and visitors and online testing before a final design was selected and approved by leadership.

As part of the redesign, the web team asserted that the best way to manage the site was to utilize a library of content tools, and the most efficient way to create this environment was to rebuild the content management system (CMS) from scratch. Alongside the design, the team contracted a vendor to create a new version of the CMS using its platform. The new CMS allows the site to have more flexibility and customization than before.

After the build, the team executed a comprehensive communications plan to insure that key stakeholders and external web managers were informed of various changes/updates to content and URLs, so that everything was connected at go-live

Results