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The Role of User Experience on a Children's Hospital Site
Designing a website for a children's hospital is unlike any other UX challenge. It’s not about selling a product or promoting a service; it's about providing care and support in a time of crisis.
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User experience has been a buzzword for decades. It means so many things to many of us — whether it’s a guiding principle of design, a discipline dedicated to creating usable web experiences, or the entire process of making something simply work. And, sometimes, user experience is the pathway toward a promise. Sometimes, user experience — and the work behind it — represents us at our best.
In this way, user experience is more than just a design element and a sales funnel — for a children’s hospital website, the website is also a digital representation of the entire hospital experience, from wayfinding to confidence, technology to vibe. It’s crucial to help communicate in a way that people can understand while also balancing the complexities of healthcare with the need for empathetic thinking.
It doesn’t matter what form it takes: it’s maybe the most essential element of a successful healthcare system — and, as its front door, the healthcare system website itself.
So, let’s talk about user experience and its role on a children’s hospital website.
Understand the user’s mindset.
Let’s face it — no one wants to look for a children’s hospital. Looking for a children’s hospital means looking for a solution to something scary — a symptom, a condition, or something affecting your child or a child you know. It’s frightening, and it can feel frustrating. It’s a bundle of emotions all tumbling over themselves as they look for one thing: ANSWERS.
Answers … and empathy.
And here is where the discipline of user experience kicks in.
First, let’s understand that the website for a children’s hospital is not a “standard website.” A standard website — offering solutions, asking for information, driving users to act on a value proposition — focuses on answering questions and following through on user expectations. As a customer, I should be able to better understand what the site offers and how to take the next step. User experience research and design make a plan for these exact things: helping users find what they need and how to access it.
For children’s hospitals, however, we will take those ideas and add stress and emotion to the deal. With a children’s hospital, we’re not designing a user experience for an alarm clock — we’re designing a user experience for a healthy child to improve, heal, and potentially save the life of someone’s kid. Getting face-to-face with those living through these experiences is crucial because these decisions are not just logistical but emotional.
It makes perfect sense to start with interviews. Find people who are (or have been) in need of a children’s hospital. Understand their mindset. What thoughts do they have when they first arrive? What are they nervous about or scared about? What will help them ease their mind?
This is important not because empathy and kindness are always necessary (and they are) but because the user doesn’t care about the children’s hospital website at the moment of crisis. They only care about their child. The website and the hospital, in general, are conduits toward a healthy child, and really, nothing else matters. A children’s hospital is not promoting itself as much as it is opening itself to be vetted by the concerned parent or guardian.
This takes shape in first impressions. To ease users in and help them understand the landscape. To ensure they feel supported, the only way to know what supports these users is to talk to them and ask about crucial first-blush user interface items and content needs.
- Does top-level navigation reflect a potential parent or guardian’s first questions?
- Does the homepage answer questions for common concerns, such as how to get their child into the hospital or how long they might need to wait?
- Does design ease the mind, or is it big, bold, and distracting at a time when a parent or guardian may need comfort in addition to information?
Meet them where they are.
This first impression will help, but it won’t solve everything — empathetic design goes beyond just the pathways and design, instead focusing on the entire cognitive load of someone in a stressful situation. I’ve had kids who have gone through emergencies, and I can tell you that the biggest hurdle in gathering information is not finding it but understanding it at a moment when fight-or-flight mechanisms are firing off in our brains.
We aren’t all medical professionals. We aren’t all seasoned veterans who have scoured every last word across WebMD and beyond. We’re parents and guardians, and we’re looking for someone to trust.
So, while user experience sounds like a “kind of design,” in reality, it represents the entire scope of making a site understandable and navigable in a way that reflects the user’s environment and mental state at that point. We can’t be everything to everyone, but we can at least take steps to make the site understandable.
First, because site users aren’t usually doctors or seasoned veterans, we must communicate beyond the needs of a doctor or seasoned veteran. Much like the everyday user might not understand the details of car repair or manufacturing, parents and guardians might not understand the full scope of communication around complicated and jargon-filled industries like healthcare or financial services. Instead, communication must rely on perceived benefits and context — written in plain language wherever possible — to facilitate decisions. We must communicate at the level — both at a cognitive level and at an emotional level — of those who will arrive on our site looking for help.
This doesn’t mean dumbing down everything but simply explaining complexity through real-world examples and human interaction. Children’s hospitals want to show how their providers are skilled and advanced at their work — we only want the best for our kids! — but just rattling off a bunch of medical procedures and numbers won’t cut it. As we’ve seen with our work on children’s hospital sites over the past few years, the most engaging content shows real people getting real help for their medical situations.
The ultimate goal is to help users understand that there are dozens of solutions for nearly every medical issue. The goal isn’t to pick someone perfect at one thing but to find the team that will help work through all of the possible solutions toward the real goal: healing a child.
Prove expertise, but also prove empathy.
And yet, those details matter. This is the great paradox of creating a user experience for a healthcare provider, especially one as emotionally charged as a children’s hospital: real-world examples and real language help tell the story, but the words are still the words. Expertise does not come in generalities but in detailed communication about procedures, successes, and research.
Our work has shown that technology and knowledge are sought after. Getting a user into the proverbial “front door” of a website is one thing, but eventually, you’ll need to back it up with facts. This means taking that empathetic communication—a user’s need for stress-free navigation and an understanding of the larger scope—and making purposeful connections to the expertise of the providers and institution.
For example, a children’s hospital that has communicated its success through testimonials and awards may need to take that next step: once the user is bought into the institution, how will they be helped? This is what I’ve called a narrow and deep approach to site navigation and communication, where you allow users to buy in early and then gradually uncover more and more details as requested. This might take the form of related content, connections between light stories and fundamental research, or even an automated, interconnected content model that identifies next steps through specialties, conditions, providers, or locations, slowly helping a stressed and emotional user step further and further into a solution without the overwhelming rush of “everything all at once.”
This may not even be a web thing. The organization needed to help purposefully increase user experience, which begins much earlier and higher than the website planning committee — it reflects the organization itself. If you want to prove expertise, you need to establish empathy, and if you’re going to demonstrate empathy, you need to follow through on real-life situations with the same knowledge and empathy you hope to show on the site.
People want to share their stories when things go well. And there’s nothing that proves expertise and empathy better than a past patient or parent talking about it out loud, proud to be a patient or proud to be a parent, and thankful that everything is a bit better than when they started.
It’s the users that matter most.
One article cannot fix a children’s hospital website, but a straightforward task can at least start it down the right path: talk to the people who represent your parent and guardian base. Understand what they’re looking for. Make the experience about the user, not your promotions or initiatives.
A healthcare institution is run by a thousand guiding principles, from their deep commitment to high-level care to the necessary need for elective procedures and other profit centers. Some people are there to heal, some to help navigate the waters, and some to make sure things stay profitable so they can continue to heal and help navigate the waters.
They all answer to one person: the potential parent or guardian. They are the actual humans living in a scary and stressful situation. They are the person responsible for caring for their child and helping find a solution despite the complicated world of healthcare. We owe it to them to make the experience about them with empathy and understanding.