Here at Modea, we’ve been redesigning our website to match who we are and what we do. Last month, we unveiled our refreshed visual brand and rolled that out across our website.
While we’ve consistently made incremental improvements to our website over the years, this latest evolution reflects our fully new visual identity. Our new fonts, colors, and brand patterns have helped us streamline and propel our website forward. Now, we have a website we’re proud of — one that showcases our digital consulting and web development and design work with major hospitals and healthcare institutions throughout the country.
In medicine, there’s a saying about a doctor who needs to tend to their own health: “Physician, heal thyself.” For us, you might say it was, “Consultant, consult with thyself.” After helping launch countless digital experiences for hospitals and health systems, we finally took ourselves on as a client, treating our website redesign as the strategic investment we know it to be.
It was a good reminder of the value of design, and what it looks like to tackle the challenges associated with refreshing a brand and launching a redesigned website.
Good Design Draws Them In, Bad Design Sends Them Away
As a digital consultancy, we’ve long understood how important smartly-designed digital spaces are, given that people are (a) impatient, and (b) seeking intuitive, friction-less experiences at every digital touchpoint.
Research shows that users form an opinion about your website in less than one second. And the vast majority of first impressions (more than 90%) are design related.
Customers expect your website to be on par with the best consumer apps and sites they use every day. That’s been true for at least a decade. Now, with zero click search, websites are also competing against things like AI Overviews. The race to answer questions quickly has intensified, especially in healthcare.
Consider the fact that almost half of all users won’t wait longer than two seconds for a website to load, and eight out of nine online users won’t return to a website after a bad experience.
Your website may be a potential customer’s first engagement with your brand, whether they are trying to schedule an appointment or learn about your services. They expect your website to be seamless. The minute the path breaks down, a click doesn’t make sense, or a menu feels confusing, you risk losing trust and confidence in your brand.
In other words, great website design can mean the difference between customers who engage with your brand and those who leave frustrated.
Why Good Website Design is a Strategic Choice
Your website is a precious asset that needs tending, reimagining, and continual fine-tuning. That’s why investing in website design is a strategic business choice, the same way investing in physical infrastructure or talent is. It translates into deeper engagement, competitive differentiation, and measurable ROI.
We know from our own experience that investing means allocating both time and budget to the project. That’s not always easy to do. We faced challenges, in the same way our clients do.
We offer these five insights about designing a digital experience your organization is proud of and your customers will love.
- Using agile delivery helps the process feel less daunting. Just as we do with clients, we used our agile delivery process from discovery through launch, validating decisions along the way and keeping the user experience central. Using an agile framework kept us disciplined and allowed us to be iterative in our work. Agile allows for rapid adjustments and guarantees an end product that’s both functional and elegant.
- Investing in design is an opportunity for alignment. When there are several organizational initiatives, tackling a redesign can feel like putting the cart before the horse. However, the process of collaborating can help align organizational goals and technology capabilities. That alignment reduces cost, improves efficiency, and drives measurable business impact — from higher acquisition and retention to stronger patient satisfaction scores. Investing in design is investing in better business outcomes.
- Best practices matter more than trends. One of the objections we hear from clients is that they fear making an investment when technology is rapidly changing. After all, many health systems are undergoing complex digital transformations. Their website may be out-of-date, but it can feel easier to wait, to see which trends “stick.” From our perspective, it’s always about harnessing design best practices, which are based on real UX research, versus hype.
- Embrace the idea of phasing. You don’t have to launch the entire new site at once. For our own redesign, we implemented a phased approach, focusing on high priority pages first. Incremental delivery has many benefits. For example, you can allow time for things like user testing and fixing bugs. For hospital and health systems sites, in particular, phasing the launch helps digital teams buy time to ensure the content is updated and matches the new user experience, versus migrating everything from an old user experience.
- Your website is still your space to claim. It’s true that consumer behavior is rapidly changing, with things like zero-click search. There’s a school of thought that websites themselves might become obsolete, as people increasingly rely on AI to do everything from find quick answers to book appointments. We don’t see this happening any time soon. Your website remains one of your biggest brand assets. It is yours and yours alone to claim, shape, message, and present to the world. That will always be worth the investment.
Our goal with our new website is to be crystal clear on the value we bring, and to make it easy to engage at multiple touchpoints. We also know that our website is never done. We will continue our work to optimize our own digital experience and drive better engagement. Strategic design work helped us find a new level of clarity for our business. It just might do the same for yours.
Statistics referenced in this post were sourced from Forbes Advisor’s Website Statistics Report.
