Using a Digital Roadmap to Guide Web Design
Goals
A world-class academic medical center, Keck Medicine of USC was in a constant battle to acquire and retain patients in Los Angeles — one of the most competitive healthcare markets in the U.S. They wanted to create a roadmap for improving their digital experience and converting more users into customers.
Ultimately, their goal was to redesign their flagship website, keckmedicine.org.
Researching to Create a Digital Roadmap
We performed a deep research exercise to learn everything we could about their customers and how they engaged with Keck Medicine of USC’s digital experience. Our research showed that while established patients returned for successive healthcare needs, first-time and prospective patients often got stuck because of a sub-par digital experience in which they failed to find what they needed.
Our Analytics and User Experience teams sifted through a year’s worth of data to decipher the main user pathways and pain points within those pathways. Our team helped Keck Medicine of USC develop a deeper understanding of their main audiences through:
- UX research
- Competitive analysis
- Focus groups and online surveys
- Session recording analysis and live usability testing
- Stakeholder interviews, including referring physicians
From our analysis, we developed a digital roadmap, with specific steps Keck Medicine of USC could take to enhance their digital platform.
Putting Digital Strategy into Action
One of the biggest recommendations was to unify all of Keck Medicine’s service line subdomains into the flagship domain, keckmedicine.org, and to redesign the site to be in line with healthcare website best practices. Modea is currently designing and developing this new site. The digital roadmap gave us the beginning of a web strategy, which we strengthened considerably by creating a comprehensive content strategy.
Hospitals often struggle with how to organize their content and keep a uniform experience across service lines, locations, and provider pages. With the content strategy, we created page templates with defined structures. These templates carry enough flexibility to work across specialties, but offer a consistent, streamlined experience — which helps drive engagement in a competitor marketplace.
Instead of a mishmash of content and convoluted structure, there is now a clear path for finding care and referring patients. The content strategy also helped point the way for prioritizing how Keck Medicine would reauthor pages, so that key pages would be ready for launch.
