Think of a website that you absolutely love. What elements make that user experience engaging or straightforward? Now think through a recent digital experience that missed the mark. It’s easy to identify the small things that take us off track, isn’t it? You feel it. It’s a little more difficult to pinpoint the elements that could make the process more smooth, agile, and even fun.
Optimizing user engagement is crucial for the success of any website. In our previous article, we looked at some examples of awesome healthcare websites. Now that we know what a great healthcare website looks like, how can you start making improvements to get more users engaged?
We reviewed what modern healthcare websites are doing right to give you some tips for optimizing user engagement on your healthcare website.
1. Guide your users with a clean and modern structure
It’s important to structure your site in a way that points users to the direction you’d like them to go. If you give your users free reign to all of your links and pages by placing them on the homepage, you’re going to have confused and frustrated users on your hands. Place important links on the homepage, with more important links towards the top of the page. Emphasizing important links guides users to the content they want to see, giving them a better experience and potentially giving you more patients.
2. Prioritize your message through the presentation of your content
What you choose to include on your homepage can say a lot about what you value. A strong hero image/video can demonstrate a passion for helping people, support for building the local community, or excellence in scientific research. These kinds of details help users understand what kind of healthcare experience they’re going to receive. And this visual significance has a much greater impact than including a wall of text.
3. Organize your content with mega menus
A mega menu is a good choice for sites that have many pages, including healthcare sites. Putting the links in a mega menu rather than including only a landing page with links means less clicking and more access to the content users want. Be aware of how the links in your mega menu are organized–poorly ordered links can make it difficult for users to find what they’re looking for.
4. Create thoughtful landing pages
One improvement that you can make on a landing page is to use a sidebar to store all the links for that page. This strategy allows you to display more content without compromising order and simplicity. Users still have access to the rest of the content through this landing page without it becoming a distraction.
5. Provide a user-friendly, intuitive doctor search
Searching for a physician can be a daunting task. There are a lot of factors to consider–where the doctor’s office is located, what insurance they accept, what the doctor specializes in. An already frustrating situation can get worse if search functionality is limited, obscure, and difficult to use. Make your user’s life easier by improving your doctor search page.
Finding a doctor can be a complex and exhaustive search. One way to improve this is to take a leaf from the e-commerce book. E-commerce filter sidebars, like what you’d see on Amazon, allow you to include a lot of filter options without compromising the view of the products (in this case, physicians). You can break up the filters into different categories, and place more popular and important filters towards the top. Some important criteria that is rarely included is whether the doctor is accepting a new patient and what insurance the doctor accepts.
Why is this better than just using a smart search for all criteria? The smart search approach can be helpful because it autofills the search bar based on what the user starts typing. While this does help a little, it does not help those who do not necessarily know what they’re looking for. If you go with this method, be sure to include multiple keywords/phrases. For example, allow a user who looks up “eye doctor” to find an optometrist.
6. Include social media feeds and sharing
Including social media feeds and sharing options quickly brings your healthcare website to the 21st century. Besides being a modern trend, getting involved online has great benefits. Your online activity is your chance to show what you care about, to build your reputation. People like to see what you’re passionate about, and social media is a great way to do that. Your healthcare website should also include sharing options for your users. If a user shares something from your site, it’s basically free advertising! Use social media to your advantage. Make sharing available throughout your site, but don’t let it get in the way of your content.
7. Keep it brief
Keep the bulk of your text on content pages and away from the homepage and landing pages. Too much text on these pages that should be visually engaging clutter up valuable space. Keep descriptions brief and allow your users to navigate to that content should they want it.
8. Make it mobile
This is an important tip for all websites. Making your website responsive means that it can be accessed from any device and still provide users with the same experience. Usability and presentation should be maintained regardless of where the user is coming from. And now more than ever, we are seeing users access sites solely from their mobile devices. If you aren’t able to make an impact on a phone or tablet, you’ll lose out on users.