UK HealthCare - custom Drupal website redesigned and navigation overhaul

overview

For the UK HealthCare website, connecting patients and visitors to the information they need, when they need it, in a clear and intuitive way was the number one goal. Second was conveying “The Power of Advanced Medicine” as more than just a tagline. To accomplish this, an extensive empathy-building discovery phase was conducted in order to understand visitors’ and patients’ needs, values, fears, and goals.Armed with this knowledge, our designers and developers worked to create an award winning website that displays multiple layers of navigation in an intuitive way, provides an interactive search tool organizing many categories and taxonomies of results easily, and that provides a flexible and easy-to-use content management system for the multiple content managers across the site.

Methods used

Secondary Research
Primary User Research
User Personas
Journey Mapping
Site Mapping & Infrastructure Design
UX Design - Wireframing
Responsive Design
Agile Development Process
Fully-Customized CMS Backend
QA Testing
Continued Design, Maintenance & Support

Process - Research & Design

Over the years, the needs of the UK HealthCare website expanded to include the consolidation of multiple hospitals and clinics, each with enough content and navigation to justify being their own independent websites. In addition, each of these hospitals and clinics’ sites, with their own independent content managers and stakeholders, were built on their own subdomains and would make design decisions that were not part of a standardized UK HealthCare look, feel, or flow. Finally, as more taxonomies and related content began to be created, keeping all of the “wires straight” on the backend became a patchwork of “duct tape and string” solutions. Without a CMS that allowed for much flexibility, everything had to be custom-made, time-consuming solutions. With all of these limitations, and paired with an aging look and feel, it was time to start from scratch.Having had a long-standing partnership with the University of Kentucky and UK HealthCare and APAX were already well-equipped to hit the ground running with the project. In addition to the personal working relationships that we had built over the years, our experience with their brand values, user groups, and integrated marketing goals helped us onboard very quickly to the requirements of this undertaking.

Process - Research & Design

Building a wholly new experience and user flow that considers a multitude of service lines, hospitals, clinics, and departments as well as countless other taxonomies of content such as providers, conditions, treatments, and articles was a tall task. We knew from the outset that whatever we designed had to be built upon a solid foundation of user research as well as an understanding of their content creation and management needs.At APAX, as part of our user-centric design and development process, we first build empathy for our users in a deep-dive discovery phase to learn the needs, values, fears, and goals of all user types, stakeholders, and content managers. The primary and secondary research methods that we determined appropriate for this project included:

Data analytics
Behavioral tracking
Competitive analysis
Online user surveys
User interviews
Passive observation sessions
Think aloud sessions
System Usability
Scale scoring
Card sorting
Affinity Diagramming

Leverage Insights

Using the insights from this research, we were able to accurately build user personas and map their journey and experiences from trigger event to ultimately becoming a brand loyalist and advocate. During our research, we learned just how critical the organization of information and the experience of navigating throughout the site was to all of our users. In some places, we identified the need for up to 4 types of navigation on a single page.

Development & QA

By including our engineers in the discovery phase, the APAX team was able to move swiftly and tackle prioritized efforts in parallel. We were able to continue the conversation regarding less-defined features and refine the implementation details of existing functionality all while building the foundation for the new experience.Once the schema of core site functionality was agreed upon, custom data migrations were crafted to continually copy and transform content from the live legacy site into the data structure of the new development site. This environment is always accessible by our clients so they can see the progress in real time of APAX’s development process.As modules and features of the site are completed, our QA specialists ensure the product meets our standards for excellence. In addition to the end user having a quality product to use, we put equal emphasis on the content curator’s tools striving for an intuitive and easy-to-use interface

Final Product

After what we would consider one of the smoothest site launches in APAX’s history, regardless of size, the site would be immediately revered by the community, healthcare providers, and stakeholders alike for its clean, modern look and feel, its usability and navigation, and for its new search experience. The site has since been recognized by several web awards organizations.

awards

W3 Awards Winner - 2022

Digital Health Awards Winner - 2021

EHealthcare Awards Winner - 2022

Ongoing Partnership

After taking a very short breath to enjoy the success of the launch, we immediately got back to work in partnership with UK HealthCare to continue to maintain, improve and optimize the site. One of the biggest and most impactful additions to the site post-launch has been the design and implementation of a new article page template for a patient spotlight series called Extraordinary People.

Extraordinary People

As part of our ongoing partnership with UK HealthCare, we were always looking for ways to improve the experience on the site. One especially successful example is the redesign of their patient story spotlight series called “We are Proof.” Like all of the separate subsites that were consolidated in the redesign, “We are Proof” had its own subdomain, look, feel, and branding. The goal of Extraordinary People was to create a new long-form article template that married the style and design of the new UK HealthCare website with unique storytelling and a focus on photography. During the design phase, we also needed to account for the migration of any legacy content from the old site and consider how it would be presented in the new design. We are proud of how we migrated existing images to fit the new, dynamically-scrolling interactions while preserving the images’ relevance to the new stories that were written. On the desktop experience, the solution came in the form of imagery being tied to blocks of copy that would trigger the advancement of a gallery on scroll depth. The mobile experience used custom scripts to place imagery in galleries at points in the story where they worked in context of the story. Both of these represented perfect solution for telling the story in both words and imagery.