The Challenge:

The digital presence for a large academic medical center had grown in an ad hoc fashion for the 20 years since it's inception. The organization wanted to standardize the digital footprint for the school's brand.

The Solution:

The redesign project was an overhaul of an online brand presence with the long term goal of providing a user friendly, dynamic website and social media presence that was compatible with the larger brands of both the university campus and the healthcare system that it was associated with. All this while giving a true representation of the breadth and depth of the school to both internal and external audiences. 

 
 

My Role:

My role was to create the initial strategy for a phased rollout, conduct user research, oversee cross-team coordination for content creation, create front-end assets, and implement build-out related to the project. I collaborated with administrative teams, networking, engineering, product, and content development teams to launch this project.

Tools Used:

Competitive analysis, site-maps, Invision, interviews, persona creation, focus groups, Adobe CC, CMS with Bootstrap components.

 
 

Discovery & Design

Competitive analysis

To assess where we currently stood in the market, I researched the top 10 medical schools in the country. I wanted to see informational patterns, find design pitfalls to avoid, and explore where we could improve.

Site maps

I wanted to better reimagine the Information Architecture and visualize what needed new representation. To do this, I created an initial site-map. To start, I based the site-map on my knowledge of the existing web properties that needed to migrate. After speaking with Dean's Office leadership, I added departments that needed completely new sites.

 
 

Focus groups

I needed to better understand the business needs and requirements, so made plans to get face time with stakeholders in differing areas of the school. To validate my initial site maps and resort the navigation as needed, I facilitated many focus groups. These focus group meetings were with the various department administrators at the school, staff members, and leadership of variying levels. I wrote moderator scripts and grounded the meetings in the initial analysis and research conducted to this point.

Personas & empathy maps

After validating the site map and defining the business needs, I conducted user interviews. I met with medical students, student leadership, and faculty leadership from the Dean's Office. My goal here was to create factual personas and empathy maps so that we could structure the experience around them. There were many target audiences in this project. For this reason, I wanted to be able to always refer to five factual archetypes.

Sketches and wireframes

At this point in the process, I began wireframing to think through the flow, structure, and hierarchy of the new front end experience. To translate iterations of the design to leadership, I used pen/paper, whiteboards, and Paper 53 to create low-fidelity wireframes.

 
 

Content Strategy

One of the major goals of the overall project was to create more engagement, which means creating content that the users (in this case students, faculty, and scientists) would be interested in engaging with. One way that we tackled this ask was with a multi-category blog strategy.

In addition to written content, there is ongoing video and photographic content creation, graphic and infographic creation – and all of this gets shared out through the social channels to push traffic back and forth.

 
 

Key Learnings

  • The most difficult challenge with this project was pulling together all of the different departments, groups, and new content types to create one cohesive experience. Particularly with groups that were initially afraid of change. With this in mind, we were able to identify the ‘low hanging fruit’ and tackle those items first to use as a shining example of the quality of work to be delivered, and eventually excite everyone with the momentum of the project.

  • At the beginning of our project the bounce rate was at 74.53% and the root site for the school was basically a link portal. After launching the first phase of the website, the bounce rate dropped 23%. There is now a regular publishing cadence for updated content and engagement pieces and site engagement increased across all segments.

  • We implemented SEO best practices and friendly URLs - direct traffic has almost tripled and mobile traffic has increased 5% - 8% across all sections!