Hospital del Mar Web: Redesign
In the past, the only reason that brought to me check a hospital website would be to either get the phone number, check visiting times or get the address (all things that nowadays can be done almost entirely through Google Maps).
But we are currently living in the middle of a world pandemic — there is a lot of information out there regarding hygiene, norms, do’s and don’ts, etc. and at times, it gets complicated to learn which is true and which is not.
Now more then ever, I rely on my closest hospital website to try and get some of the much needed “official” info :
After a brief analysis of the entire page, I identified some elements that clearly needed a rework and others that were completely missing.
For this reason, I attempted a redesign on both the architecture of the information and the design style (respecting the branding colors and logo) to give my personal view on how the page should be structured.
Let’s proceed.
REFERENCE TO CURRENT EVENTS
The first thing that struck me was the total lack of information regarding the COVID-19 (which was amongst the first reasons to bring me to their website).
This hospital is a branch of a major “Parent” in which you can find much up-to-date information but not in its branches websites — I realize that developing costs may be higher than the return of investment, should each branch be updated with its own content, but a simple redirection to the main parent page would suffice.
Something like a top banner similar to this:
To further stress the importance of relevant information in a hospital webpage I would also mention once again the Coronavirus within the News sections but also giving the option to access all the rest of the news:
HOSPITAL MAIN SERVICES
Considering the variety of users that a hospital has, It is very important that all information is exposed in a clear and intuitive way — not to mention that the most relevant info for users should be highlighted vs the rest of the content.
For this reason, I don’t believe simple text is enough to reach that goal — certain information should be more instantly visible with the least text possible and remove all the noise caused by “extra” content (moving it elsewhere such as a drop-down menu could be one of the options)
My proposal for this section would be the following :
The highlighted options may vary between hospital and hospital, but my personal opinion is that these are the 4 most important options that, as a user, I would want to have immediately on sight:
- How to make/modify an appointment online (if the hospital does have this option) or all info related to the topic.
- Emergency unit — when and how to contact and visit the emergency unit (and considering the coronavirus situation I’m sure it’s a section that many people would want to have 1 click away).
- Contact us — ideally a direct call button for those devices that have the option to do so or a redirection to a section with all the key hospital numbers (and not just a very small text on top of the page).
- Visitors — all the needed information to visit a loved one being recovered.
With a few changes, key and valuable content are easily highlighted for the user, improving its experience when navigating through the web of the hospital and, potentially, avoiding unnecessary calls and queries which are translated for less time wasted for our esteemed healthcare agents.
