Author: Alex Birch

Designing and building websites in the health and pharmaceutical sector is somewhat different to other typical website briefs.  

At Polar London we have built up our in-house experience to help clients tackle the common challenges when designing and building best in class websites for pharmaceutical products and targeting healthcare professionals.   
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Here are the most common challenges we hear and how we help tackle them.

Our website can’t show up on Google search?  

We often hear that the website is intended for healthcare professionals only, we cant have the site appearing on Googlesearch?

There are simple steps from a development and UX point of view to take:

• Ensuring that when any users arrives at the site, that we clearly signpost for medical professionals vs steering the general public to the appropriate content. 
• From a development perspective we configure robots.txt files to prevent spiders, review all HTTP headers and Metatags to be configured to actively discourage search engines from indexing the site.  

​These simple techniques are part of our process and help solve SEO.

How can we easily manage references? 

Understanding the importance of legal and medical referencing is something we commonly come across, from a process and implementation perspective. 

Working within content management systems (CMS) that are able to easily configure referencing should be common practice. 

We recommend platforms such as WordPress – for easy CMS capabilities, which empowers our clients and content writers to easily manage, add and remove references throughout a website in a few simple steps.    

We need a simple legal approval process?

Stakeholder management and approvals are obviously an important part of medical related content and publications online. We use simple staging environments for a phased approval cycle.  

Staging: This environment would be a replica of the live site where our clients, legal teams and writers can update content and share via a browser (which is password protected), for internal and external approvals. 

Production: Once staging is approved we move all amends to the production environment for final quality assurance and sign off before publishing.  

Live: The live website sits on a secure hosting platform and can easily be updated through the above steps and approvals.  

Content ‘One click away’

Its common for prescribing information and other legal requirements (T+C’s / privacy / disclaimer/ references) needing to be one click away at all times, we consider this at the early UX stages and integrated as part of the core build and quality assurance process. 

Accessibility & Performance

Performance monitoring is always an option to consider.  Dependent on visitor levels and content server configurations can be made as part of a recommended maintenance agreement.
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Our sites have microcaching enabled to reduce load on database servers. *meaning the site wont crash with an influx of traffic. 

W3C compliance 

Taking into consideration that accessibility will be key for users, there are measures we can take to ensure an accessible experience. 

For users with lower bandwidth and or data access, hearing or visual disabilities, there are measures we can take as part of the design and build process, we would built the site and core content with lower rez /load capabilities, enabling all user to access the core information. 

We recommend using WCAG checklist to track accessibility. Useful tool for AA compliance testing, covering points such as;

• Captions 
• Audio description 
• Contrast 
• text size 
• image text 
• labels 
• language 
• consistent navigation 
• identification 
• error messaging and prevention 
  

Simple, clean design and coding does lend itself well to smaller page downloads, increasing speed and access quality to the end user experience.   

See our article on Web design trends for 2021.

Conclusion

• Managing visitor expectations with clear sign posting  
• There are simple best practices to follow for not appearing on search engines
• Early stage development planning can assist when it comes to a simplified legal approval processes 
• Its key to consider early stage planning during UX to solve ‘one click away’ requirements    
• Accessibility can make the difference to someone consuming, accessing and sharing your content

Author: Alex Birch 
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6 best practices when it comes to top performing web design for 2021!

#webdesign #polarlondon #thinkdigital  ​

Some amazing data sits behind this thinking.

1. Use a mix of photography and graphics

Photography and illustration is always a winner, try and avoid using just stock photography as it can be a big turnoff, 

Users spend an average of 5 seconds looking at a website hero image 
59% prefer beautiful websites design 
38% will leave unattractive websites 

2. Use bold fonts

Keep your copy light, to the point and try and pick out the key words and put them in bold. 

Users only read 20% of words on a webpage 
Websites score 47% higher in usability when text is scannable 

3. Consider visual hierarchy

Have clear sign posting and CTA’s. 
Let your users find the information they are looking for as quickly as they can. 
Allow plenty of space for text and images. 
Consider the devices users engage with your content. 

44% leave with no contact details 
70% sites for SMB don’t have clear CTA 
Customers expect to land on the home page when they click your logo! 

4. Implement Personalised and localised content 

Make your users feel special, wanted and considered. (not just another customer to get through the door). Use data touch points such as cookies and geo-location to help personalise.  

54% users prefer personal rather than generic 
59% want real time deals
74% feel frustrated with content is not personalised  

Make sure your content translates, there are statics to link the most common error at a check out being around localisation errors.  

5. Think Mobile focused Ecommerce

One of the biggest growing markets for how users purchase online, accelerated in 2020! 

​70% of searches on mon lead to action within 1 hour 
45% customers say they shop using their mobile 

6. Users want faster website load speeds

40% wont wait longer than 3 seconds for content 
85% want mobile to load fast 

Credit: % and states according to Website builder expert 

We love to dive into new trends that impact great UX and IA design. 

This is the top list from UX webhost:  

1. Dark Mode. 
2. 3D Elements.
3. Voice User Interface.
4. Bold Typography.
5. Login Without Passwords.

Design trends sprout from both users and competitors; whilst some are only passing trends, others may stick around for some time and may even change the core principles and practices of UX/UI design. Some of the world’s leading brands like Apple, Google, and Instagram are offering dark mode in their options.

Great article here if you want to read more.

#ux#ui#design

We found some really nice insights on why ‘great web design’ is so important.

If we all make websites more beautiful by design then visitors will come more readily, stay for longer, and purchase more often.

Website design has become an art in itself. Adding illustration to your website design will help improve your site’s aesthetic value, encourage visitors to stay longer, and increase conversion rates . 
During the Internet’s early days, artwork and illustrations were considered an integral part of web design. Art, on the other hand, was dismissed as unimportant in the context of websites.

Check out this article from Anton M. on ‘The Power of Art and Illustration in modern day websites’.   

It emphases the importance of best practices when it comes to good design and how aesthetics can really impact the end users journey.   

We have seen the internet come along way over the years from a design perspective.

But is the art of good design getting lost with short form content, stock-imagery so readably available, and template web-designs taking over the WWW? 

We recognise the importance of good web design and will always encourage our clients to consider this as part of their online customer brand experience.   
#ux#design#userexperience