.net magazine Design Challenge: Health
Fortune Cookie's Paul Lyons, Designer, and Dave Ward, Project Manager and Information Architect, were asked by .net magazine to makeover the website for www.gp-training.net. Here is what they did.
Site www.gp-training.net
Launched 1992
Brief
Brad Cheek, the website’s founder, wants to make the site modern and inviting. It must also be easy for him to manage the 2,000 pages.
Gp-training.net is Brad’s labour of love. It’s packed with useful resources for GPs, GP trainers and patients. Brad has managed the site for purely altruistic reasons for more than a decade – it was first developed as a basic intranet site for his GP surgery. His dedication to providing help and advice to other GPs is why Fortune Cookie is so keen to help him with a site makeover.
Brad identifies his main audience as medical educators (GP trainers), GPs in training, patients and himself (he uses the site every day). The main purpose of the site is to provide and share information between GPs and GP trainers to help them keep abreast of the latest developments.
The diagnosis
Fortune Cookie quickly identified the symptoms of a serious, yet common, website malady: gp-training.net hasn’t kept pace with the latest design trends and is currently suffering the effects of a midlife crisis. With more than 2,000 pages, the site has become bloated. It’s outgrown its once simple and logical structure.
The homepage contains more than 70 links, most of which appear to have the same relative importance. This makes it extremely difficult for users to scan the page for information.
The site is also in a rather ‘depressed’ state – users have no real incentive to make repeat visits nor to engage with the content or with other site visitors. A fresh design would make it more inviting, engaging and attractive, as well as helping to improve the accessibility of the information and enhance search engine rankings.
After more than a decade online, the site should reap the rewards that come with maturity! Brad has developed an impressive resource and a communication style that works for the audience. However, the technology and functionality is ancient and this is negatively affecting the sites performance.
The prescription
Health information is currently undergoing an online revolution. The UK Government is ploughing at least £6bn pounds into new IT systems for the NHS. As the quality of online NHS information improves, Brad must move with the times.
"The design of the site must reassure its visitors that the information they're reading is credible, reliable and safe"
Paul Lyons and Dave Ward, Fortune Cookie
It’s good news for Brad that patients and health professionals are turning to the web for health information in greater numbers than ever before. The British Medical Association lists a number of sites that contain reliable health information on its website (www.bma.org.uk/ap.nsf/Content/healthinfonet). If gp-training.net is to compete, then Brad must keep an eye on how these sites are performing – and do better!
We think one of the greatest challenges for health sites, such as gp-training.net, is to gain the trust of its users. The design of the site must reassure visitors that the information they’re reading is credible, reliable and safe. To do this, it needs to have a recognisable brand.
Recommended course of treatment
The redesign focuses on improving the user experience. Our aim was to develop gp-training.net to become a leading network for GP trainers and GPs.
To create the new user-centric design, we first worked on the site structure and navigation. The site has three types of user: GP trainers, GPs and patients. Their reasons for visiting and their level of understanding of the subject matter vary significantly. In the new structure, we’ve grouped the content into three main areas, one for each user type. We’ve used tabs on the main navigation bar to clearly label these areas. Tabs are ideal for navigation because they’re clear, user-friendly and indicate where the user is as they navigate the site.
Within each area of the site, we’ve divided the content into four, five or six sections (for example, ‘Tutorials’ and ‘Training aids’). We’ve split each of these sections into sub-sections. The section names must be clear and unambiguous.
Another area we concentrated on was design. We added a strap line to describe the purpose of the site. This provides new users with a little more insight into what the site’s about. Users can now perform a search from every page. We gave the site a fresh, modern look. The photo of a doctor helps to add personality and, combined with testimonials and icons, helps make the site look friendly, trustworthy and useful.
A key feature of our redesign is an online community, enabling GP trainers and GPs to discuss topics. They can add, edit, comment on and rate much of the information on the site. The creation of the members’ area means that only GPs and GP trainers have the ability to create and assess site content. Information on the site is now more valuable and credible for other GPs, trainers and patients. Enabling user-generated content (UGC) also means the site is constantly being added to, and this reduces the maintenance burden.
We also added a web poll, an editor’s blog and an external newsfeed in an effort to engage users on the site for longer and to encourage repeat visits to gp-training.net. Brad will find that all these additions are easy to manage.
The final area we wanted to consider was how we could make the site generate some revenue. Though we have a number of ideas about this, Brad was clear that he would like to continue to offer gp-training.net on a non-profit basis. So, continuing on that altruistic theme, our final job was to create an area for charity banner ads.
“The design of the site must reassure its visitors that the information they’re reading is credible, reliable and safe” Paul Lyons and Dave Ward
Fortune Cookie carried out the four steps below for the GP-Training.net redesign project. They’re key components of Fortune Cookies planning phase for website redesigns. User testing was carried out with four participants on the new design and the existing GP-Training.net website. The results were analysed and documented and the wireframes and design were updated based on the feedback that was received.
1 Sitemap
We created a sitemap that defines the hierarchy and structure of the site. It ensures that every page fits into the overall site design and that all stakeholders understand the site’s scale and arrangement. We scanned using Maximine, a site analytics solution that provided our information architect with a number of reports about the existing site structure and its accessibility. We carried out a content audit of the site followed by reviews of competitor sites. Our information architect then began to create the site taxonomy by grouping similar content types together and prioritising it.
2 Wireframes
Our wireframe prototypes showed how the final sites pages would be structured and how they would be used. Wireframes are a way of developing the sites presentational composition in a visual manner that closely resembles the websites eventual page structure. Our wireframes underwent a usability principles evaluation. A colleague of the information architect who created our wireframes evaluated each of them and checked that their process flows followed best-practice usability standards.
3 Design
Our designer planned a creative strategy that responded to the brief in terms of brand development and effective website design. He then created styleboards to communicate initial ideas on concept, colour, typography, supporting graphics, layout and imagery. From the selected styleboards and wireframes, the designer created initial screen designs for the homepage and a lower page of the site that were in line with the creative vision. These key screens were then developed further to create a set of templates that communicated the content most effectively across the whole site.
4 User testing
Fortune Cookie believes that usability testing is the best way to uncover usability problems that could have a negative impact on the effectiveness of the site. We recruited people to test the site for up to one and a half hours. We took note of the feedback we received from the tests and incorporated it into our final design.
This article was originally published in Issue 159 of .net magazine February 2007