Recently, the website that LHWH designed for McLeod Health was honored as the Best Mobile Website in the nation, in the WebAward 2017 competition. The Web Marketing Association is the producer of the WebAward Competition. Now in its 17th year, the WebAward program is the longest running annual website award competition dedicated to naming the best websites in 96 industries while setting the standard of excellence for all website development.
Top caliber industry professionals reviewed websites using seven criteria; Design, Ease of Use, Copywriting, Interactivity, Use of Technology, Innovation and Content. A whole lot of research and development strategy went into the development of the new, award-winning McLeod Health website. Just as the latest advancements in healthcare technology improve outcomes, the innovative LHWH design significantly improves user experience.
A ‘REMOTE CONTROL’ STRATEGY
In today’s world, mobile devices are a ‘can’t-live-without-it’ part of everyday living. We use them to make banking transactions, monitor and adjust our thermostats, SmartCast our favorite TV channels or even to just dim the lights.
When designing the McLeod Health website, we took into consideration how users interact with mobile technology and latest innovations. From there, we set out to design a ‘remote control’ to access more information for better health. Through a careful study of analytics of McLeod Health’s previous website, we identified the content that users visited most and brought it forward within a thumb’s reach.
BUILDING A CUSTOMIZED PHYSICIAN FINDER SEARCH ENGINE
From there, our designers and programmers put their heads together with McLeod Health and its marketing team to design and develop a custom Physician Finder aimed at delivering the best mobile (and desktop) user experience possible. We brainstormed with some of McLeod Health’s physicians, who offered valuable insight into what their patients desired most in their search for the best care. The strategy: Design for the fewest amount of clicks needed to access the most amount of pertinent information.
We developed a robust auto-complete search field that tracks entries as they’re typed – and aggregates content from a database of over 500 doctors and over 200 practices to instantaneously display and organize results related to a search. As a user types, a dropdown menu displays relevant results in three categories: Physicians, Specialties, and Practices.
Research also showed that many patients prefer to search for Physicians and Practices closest to a specific area – such as where they live. For this reason, we designed custom SEARCH BY ZIP CODE and USE MY LOCATION fields. Users enter their zip code and a complex algorithm analyzes the locations of McLeod’s state-wide staff – and displays the results from closest-to-farthest.
Once users have arrived at their search results, the site we designed offers them more ways to further distill the results in order to locate precisely what interests them most. A custom FILTER BY SPECIALTY tab expands an organized list of categories which McLeod’s Physicians specialize in. From there, a simple click on any specialty in the list displays filters the results to a user’s liking.
Additionally, we implemented sorting functionality that allows the search results to display all physicians – or only the ones that are currently accepting new patients, and those that aren’t.
All this, within a thumb’s reach.