Having an effective and engaging user experience for healthcare website design is more important than ever in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. With several web design trends projected for 2021, healthcare marketing must know the most vital for their online presence.
Healthcare websites that focus on user-centric web design strategies help individuals seeking services or products to have a better experience.
This article compiled the top web design trends that healthcare organizations should be aware of and apply with any web creation or redesign plans.
Why Web Design Is Important In Healthcare Industry?
Why Web Design Is Important In Healthcare Industry?
A successful patient experience and long-term connection on a healthcare website can be provided by offering simple, straightforward, and convenient access to its services. If proper content and good design work together, this performance may be achieved.
Web design trends do not necessarily apply to all. Whether or not to include them into a healthcare website is highly dependent on the demands of its users, and also the organization’s goal and identity.
For instance, web designs that encourage intuitive experiences, such as providing users with the information they need easily, are constantly on-trend. This result implies that users want excellent, convenient, and remote access to the services.
5 Top Web Design Trends For Healthcare Providers
Check out the best web design trends that healthcare marketers should learn about, as well as how the organizations can take advantage of adopting some of them into their online presence.
Customized User Experiences
Traditional healthcare is evolving in tandem with technological advancements. As more patients turn to telehealth and other virtual healthcare services, companies will need to reconsider strategies to effectively design and build experiences to suit their patients’ demands.
The design will change as needed to keep up with new technology and gadgets to emerge. Web design will have new chances to create unique and relevant user experiences with touch screens, voice user interfaces, personalization, and more.
Inclusive Design and Layout
By incorporating inclusive thinking in the design process, healthcare websites can bring a better user experience. Besides, it can also save time and money by avoiding the need to remodel the website to satisfy accessibility standards.
Take into account various standards such as color contrast, text resizing features, image alternative text, and more to make a more inclusive healthcare website.
Accessibility is a major concern in healthcare web design. However, the key point should be considering accessibility as part of the larger topic of inclusive design. To have a deeper knowledge of the target market, the demands of a diverse population must be analyzed.
Minimalism
Minimalist design is already a common idea. Presenting only the most important and required components is what it is all about. By organizing and creating balance among the content and design components, minimalism can efficiently guide the user through the website.
Website designs should show visitors the information they are searching for, and make a more visible click path by purposefully providing space between items. This way, users will avoid being overloaded when using the website.
Functionality is crucial in minimalism. It involves having a one-tap registration feature and a fast payment process. It considers a user’s click path for various tasks, like arranging an appointment, locating a physician, and completing an online bill payment.
Brand-Driven and Tailored Elements
Unique graphics, varied font, and dark layouts are some of the more aesthetically oriented design trends. Moreover, meaningful brand components are becoming more popular, translating information to elicit emotion and prompt action while also enhancing brand image.
The dark mode is the use of light-colored text, symbols, and graphical user interface components on a dark backdrop. It improves the user experience with a sleek display that stretches out the content making an illusion that the website design extends from both sides on mobile.
Designers are also experimenting more with typography after a long time of using sans-serif fonts in bold and lowercase. With artistic treatments and unusual mixes, typography is enjoying a revival.
Purposeful Micro-Interactions
Micro-interactions refer to the small design features that make visitors’ interactions with the website more inviting, engaging, and humanistic. These features are used to inform status and offer feedback to users, allowing them to see their activities’ results.
Examples are animated buttons, swipe actions, and call-to-actions with some activity connected with them. These micro-interactions are popular to encourage users to participate.
Micro-interactions may improve a brand’s image by evoking an emotional response from the user through active visual and motion design. Visitors may personalize their experience by interacting with the website in many ways.
Healthcare organizations must learn about the users well to provide them with interactions that improve rather than detract from their entire experience.
5 Tips on How To Design An Effective Healthcare Website
Build An Intuitive Navigation Structure
Every healthcare website should dedicate a significant amount of work to developing an easy-to-understand site structure. A website taxonomy, or the navigational structure, is the method of organizing the full website so that people can move from one page to the next with ease.
Web designers should arrange the entire site so that any user can immediately grasp how it is organized. Users will be able to locate the information they need quickly and efficiently without having to seek help from others.
Create a Mobile-Friendly Website Design
Having a mobile-friendly website is a must in the digital design strategy area. Most businesses have created or rebuilt their websites to match this requirement.
Based on a statistic provided in 2018, mobile devices accounted for over half (52%) of all internet browsing worldwide.
Make A Simple Yet Robust Search Function
A website that allows users to quickly discover what they need will get a permanent spot in the browser history of the user. If visitors can’t obtain what they’re searching for immediately and readily on a website, they will leave and disregard the site.
The following are the elements in creating a user-friendly site search function to consider:
- A search field or button is displayed on any page clearly and visibly. It eliminates the need to look for the search. A search function that generates recommendations as the user types is much better and helpful.
- In the results, search keywords are highlighted.
- Sorting options that users can apply. Aside from the most relevant result, users may also seek out the most recent result. Or, users may also search for the lowest-priced results and best-reviewed items, if they are on a healthcare eCommerce website.
- Categories into which search results can be sorted. For examples are Neurology, Psychiatry, Oncology, and Epidemiology, as well as any subcategories that fall under any of those areas.
- Filters that let the user refine their search even after it has been completed. Checkboxes that serve to restrict user’s search to locations, providers, products, news, and so on, for example.
- Breadcrumb Trail is a list of all the super-categories in which the search term is placed. It occasionally shows next to the number of results. For example, “Home > Health Topics > Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19)> Risk Factors > Vaccines.”
- The introductory text provides an excerpt that contains the search words rather than only the title of the result.
Emphasize The Website’s Visual Assets
Web browsing is primarily a visual medium. Websites in the healthcare industry that lack a strong visual elements such as high-quality images, video content, and animation, are underselling themselves.
There are several elements that go into enhancing the website’s aesthetic impact that designers should consider.
- Apply a limited color palette rather than a multicolored explosion. For example, aquatic colors like light blues and greens, which imply health and wellbeing, are classic colors for healthcare websites.
- Incorporate visual balance. No particular feature should draw too much attention or creates an excessive imbalance.
- Grid layouts and the Rule of Thirds are used to create a segmented design. In healthcare web design, a basic, dependable grid style is typically the way to go.
- Use of professional photography and videography. Cheap stock images cannot match the high-end quality.
- White space refers to empty areas in a design that provide a break for the eye and keep the site from being overly cluttered.
- Create complimenting graphics on the website, without flat graphics next to portrait photos taken with a narrow aperture.
- Add micro-interactions that give life to the website. It includes graphics with light gradient effects, images that change color, and reveal legends as the cursor hovers over. Remember to not put too much, be purposeful.
Display Patient Reviews and Testimonials
One of the most significant areas of a healthcare website is the patient reviews and testimonials. Potential medical patients regularly seek reviews and testimonials as sources of information.
The positive responses from other patients give potential patients more confidence in the healthcare organization and the services more credibility.
In Conclusion
It is important for healthcare organizations to pay attention to their website design and make it user-centric. As technology advances, people want their healthcare service providers to have a similar degree of digital competence as the other online platforms.