Greenwich Hospital this year completed a top-to-bottom redesign of its website, morphing from a hospital-centric, CMS-less relic to an inviting, visitor-centric and dynamically updatable tool. Attractive and easy to use, the site has new content, graphics and a customized infrastructure that reflects Greenwich Hospital’s “Be treated, well” brand and its strategic goals.
Greenwich Hospital identified its website as the centerpiece of its reinvigorated brand and service offerings. They engaged Mad*Pow for assistance re-envisioning the Greenwich Hospital website to deliver on their newly-expanded promise by providing best-in-class information, education, orientation, and communications tools to its traditional and newly acquired constituencies. A successful outcome, the joint project team posited, would be a welcoming, visually luxurious, and intuitively organized website that exuded comfort, confidence, and excellence.
Mad*Pow conducted a wide variety of user-needs research activities that helped illuminate the information needs of the hospital’s core and newly-extended audiences, with a focus on key market targets drawn from maternity, surgery, and cancer services candidates. This research-based understanding of the needs of the hospital, patients, potential patients, job seekers, medical personnel, and others enabled the joint project team to identify interface and interaction guidelines that led to extensive taxonomy workshops, conceptual modeling discussions, information architecture ideation, and wireframing activities.
Next Mad*Pow conducted usability tests of the evolving designs with key audiences and were able to validate that the resulting structural designs were straightforward to use, brand-aware, future-forward, and instantiated a highly-effective breadth of information while maintaining a singleness of purpose heretofore unseen on the Greenwich Hospital website.
What followed was a series of in-depth visual design concepting workshops where the project team explored a variety of visual design approaches and identified the most promising for the website’s visual design to follow. The Mad*Pow visual design team then extended the selected design concept to encompass the entire site and ensure that the site’s visual design enhanced the website’s strengths. The development of an interactive prototype enabled Mad*Pow to conduct further usability testing with key audiences and confirm that the website was exceeding expectations and accomplishing both Greenwich Hospital’s strategic goals and the information goals of its constituents. The project team was pleased to discover that the study participants reported being “awed” by the efficacy of the new site and eager to see it go live.
Mad*Pow then created a series of interaction and interface guidelines documents that provided a roadmap for the new website that Greenwich Hospital’s development partners could follow to bring the site to life. Mad*Pow continued to support the hospital throughout the development process by addressing developers’ questions, adjusting the redesign approach to fit technical constraints (and opportunities) and overall by helping the hospital ensure that the website lived up to its promise.
A few months later the site went live. User reaction has been unanimously positive and in fact collegial hospitals (and competitors) have given high praise to the Greenwich Hospital website for its ease of use, thoughtful organization, enhanced customer focus, broadened outreach, and visually arresting design.
We invite you to visit it at:
http://www.greenhosp.org.