How to Optimize Your Healthcare Website for Increased Digital Engagement

Healthcare consumers have always been meticulous about exploring med-focused service options. However, technology has changed the way consumers make healthcare decisions.

The average consumer's profile:

As a pharma business, you have no choice but to provide access to healthcare services that follow current consumer preferences.

How to optimize a medical website and provide potential customers with a top-notch experience?

It's about your user. At this stage, it is essential to answer two key questions: who is your ideal customer, and what does he or she need on your site? By creating a user portrait, which is defined by their needs and motivations, it will be easier and more effective for you to optimize your site.

What’s more, both need to find the necessary information immediately. That's why…

It is clear that you want to demonstrate all your trump cards to a new user at once. It seems that the higher the number of features, the higher the likelihood of “hitting” the user with one of them. But, unfortunately, that's not how it works. According to Hick's law, the time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of the options [1]. 

As with in-app onboarding, new users need progressive learning to reduce the cognitive load. Do you have a feature-rich web solution? Therefore, break complex tasks into smaller chunks or/and highlight what's most important to your user at each stage of site exploration, spicing it up with value-added services (aka features) over time.

If a user spends a lot of their time searching for the information they need, your site with a great UI may be useless. Conversely, a site with uncomplicated navigation and simple design can provide a better customer experience and give you a better ROI. The ideal scenario might look like this: the site's UI & UX complement rather than contradict each other.

For example, the main page of the Mayo Clinic has a simple design and an easy-to-read font. At the same time, in terms of UX, there is a convenient division of information into sections. For the most impatient, there is a "search" option right at the top.

Perhaps it's one that's not new to him or her. Novelty can be intimidating and disorienting when making important decisions. The so-called Jakob's law [3] comes into play here: since users spend most of their time on other sites, they prefer your site to work like all the other sites they are already familiar with.

However, the UX of your pharma site still depends on who your user is. For example, providing the option to select the font size may be pointless if your user is a medical student. However, aged users may appreciate it. Still, there are general UX rules that will improve your user experience. For example:

88% of clients are less likely to revisit a site after a frustrating experience [4].

According to Hubspot, 84.6% of web designers believe that an overloaded web design is the most common mistake startups make when creating a website [5]. The "place all at once" approach doesn't always work 100%. Indeed, users are not usually pleased to encounter additional hurdles, such as another animation or a combination of bright hues, on the way to finding a solution. It can be distracting  and ultimately irritate your users.

Note: We do not mind animations, bright colors, or 3D illustrations on healthcare sites. The main thing is that your site should end up as a unified entity. Therefore, try to create a solution that won't confuse users but will help them seamlessly reach the result, such as making an appointment with a doctor, finding the best vitamin D, ordering instant drug delivery, etc.

For example, Zocdoc uses plain colors, a bare minimum of illustrations, and provides users with a solution from the first page.

Although the average user may wait about 2 to 3 seconds before feeling annoyed, don't let your page load for more than 2 seconds [6].

On the one hand, site performance is affected by the server response time, resource load time, caching, and other technical components of your site, as well as the user's Internet speed. But on the other hand, users don't care about tech failures.

Creating a medical website is only half the battle. What is truly challenging is  making sure it meets safety standards and gets noticed by your ideal med-oriented persona is another. With developers, marketers, UI/UX designers, and healthcare professionals on board, we can help you create and nurture your medical website. Let's make digital medicine more accessible and pain-free together! Contact us, and we'll discuss the details.

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