Providing a calm and inviting experience for the web visitors of Northwell Health
Role: Visual design & design system lead; UX strategy and design collaborator
Our team took on the challenge of redesigning the website of a vast and complex health system so that it could better communicate with its patients, potential patients, and 47,000 employees within a 7-million-person service area.
The final delivered archetype page for the home page.
Through deep research into their current structure, employee desires, patient needs, doctor interests, and corporate interests, we were able to develop a set of useful personas to guide us through the massive amounts of information that needed a home on the site.
This digital experience workshop gathered ideas from our clients about what they wanted the site experience to be. Team members placed orange (no) or green (yes) sticky dots on photo printouts, and we discussed what led to those decisions. This conversation directly led to the Experience Attribute schematic, below, which informed the visual design.
We discovered and communicated the design through research briefs, an experience attribute schematic, information architecture sitemaps, and a framework consisting of scenarios storyboarded with wireframes that illustrated the flow of a visitor through the site.
Page structure outline from a visitor flow storyboard (left) with accompanying webatecture diagram (right).
The visual design was created in response to the experience attributes and persona needs we unearthed, as well as a shared desire to modernize the experience of the website.
We changed all visual direction except for the logo, as they were working on a re-branding effort concurrently. Our team synthesized a great deal of existing research, including in-depth discussions with Northwell leadership around strategic direction, in order to create the site architecture and navigation. The approach to the design was for us to create guides, templates, archetype screens, and component systems for the Northwell team to use in populating and maintaining hundreds of web pages.
Our documentation included a section on how to create pages through our modular system.
The site was launched within a very tight timeline and to satisfying accolade from site visitors and Northwell’s leadership. The new look and feel was fresh, modern, and clear, and the site architecture quickly led visitors where they want to go.
When we worked with this entity, it was called Northshore-Long Island Jewish Health System. They have since rebranded and changed their name to Northwell Health, so the current site will look quite different than these screenshots. However, we're happy to see that they retained much of our thinkering about the site architecture and patient-first approach.
Before and after of the website.