The digital destination for modern healthcare

Background

The Living Well Partnership is a group of several GP surgeries, brought together to meet the evolving needs of public health. As a partnership they are able to deliver a larger range of services to their patients. Sharing resources and increasing efficiencies through working together, rather than operating on a smaller scale as individual practices.

Over 38,000 adults and children across the eastern Southampton region have access to all seven sites and their huge team of GPs and clinicians. Including nurses, pharmacists, social prescribers, mental health and care specialists.

The challenge

Living Well Partnership approached Rareloop to help them establish a strong brand identity for the newly formed partnership and create a single online destination for their patients. The site needed to highlight a wide range of services, share information and provide clear, concise next steps to thousands of patients, replacing the identity and websites for the seven separate surgeries.

For the visual identity, their new brand had to stand confidently alongside the highly recognisable NHS logo, representing them as a trustworthy, professional and community focussed service provider.

Their website was key to their communications plan to clearly highlight the advantages and the improvements the partnership would bring to their patients. The site needed to be a destination for people to seek medical help and advice as well as vital contact information. Living Well Partnership were keen that the website solved problems and directed them to the right services quickly and easily. With so much information to be shared, they needed a partner that could provide a sustainable solution that anticipated patient needs. As well as allowing for multiple journeys, with a clear hierarchy and prominent signposting to high traffic services.

Our approach

Visual identity

We approached the branding phase before the discovery of the website, to ensure the new visual identity worked beautifully across all channels. The brand had to work digitally (social, website, apps, software), offline (press, leaflets, posters) and physically (signage, uniforms, stationery). Understanding where the assets would be used and the different touchpoints with patients, clinicians and partners was key to creating the right look and feel.

Living Well Partnership wanted their identity to complement the well established NHS logo, but incorporate some of their own personality too. Their identity needed to convey how they approach their care: professional, trustworthy, confident and caring.

In our co-design approach we create collaborative mood boards using Invision, a digital product design platform. It gives everyone the opportunity to share brand inspiration from things they’ve seen or experienced personally and professionally. This included photography, typography, colours, and destinations. It gave the team an opportunity to express their likes, dislikes and direction collaboratively. Working on this together ensured that we were all aligned for the creation of key elements and produced the best creative output.

Logo

The final visual identity uses calm cool colours; green, navy and blue. A nod to the NHS link and synonymous with a clean and professional environment. The logo visual uses the initials from the brand in a handwritten style, to provide a more personal and approachable touch.

Typography

Our focus for the main typography was inclusivity and accessibility. Understanding that the content was written for a wide demographic, making content easily readable and digestible for everyone, was key to the final decision making.

The brand has now been rolled out across all marketing materials and within the partnership surgeries.

Discovery

The discovery phase for Living Well Partnership involved a large volume of content and interlinking websites. After reviewing the requirements with the team, we created a sitemap to understand how the pages and external sites linked together. This gave us a birds eye view of the size of the project and the relationship between pages. It also helped us consider the best approach to an online triage.

One of the key aims for the site was to help patients self-serve their queries. Directing to the right place, quicker so they would receive the help they needed. Understanding all the different potential queries and solutions was the key to getting this right. This led us to the dynamic questioning flow to help triage people to the right next action and signposting to e-Consult.

After creating the sitemap of all key pages, interlinking content and external site signposting, we created wireframes. Wireframes are a layout or skeleton of the information needed on each page. They allow you to create a hierarchy of content and calls to action, without the distraction of design. They will also inform the content creation and imagery selection.

User feedback

When Living Well Partnership started working with us they were keen to involve their patients as early as possible. Once we had created the initial wireframes and designs, Living Well Partnership ran a session where they collected feedback on the creative direction and layout. This feedback provided vital direction to ensure clear user journeys on the new site.

It is so important to capture insights from real users early. Doing this within the discovery phase ensures that you can make these changes early, saving both time and money.

WordPress Website

The Living Well Partnership site is built using WordPress, the world’s most popular website builder. Using a page builder, we created a framework that the team can easily add news, update content and add consistent, user friendly pages, without the need for a developer.

Clear calls to action for the three most popular next steps: advice and appointments, prescriptions and admin enquiries are positioned as the most prominent calls to action, allowing people with easy access to the most popular actions.

There are clear links to each surgery location to assist in the transition from individual surgeries, and latest news announcements, including important COVID-19 updates.

The site highlights the partnership’s performance with key benchmarks for quality, service and progress. Living Well are passionate about improving their performance and the site showcases their Care Quality Commission Rating (CQC) rating, COVID-19 vaccination rate and eConsult consultations completed This gives patients an instant view on their GP’s performance.

The site links to eConsult, a form-based online consultation and triage platform that allows you to collect medical or administrative requests and pass them through to Living Well to triage and decide on the best care for their patients.

Dynamic Questioning

For the online triaging functionality we took inspiration from gov.uk on how they guide users through their content to provide them with the best course of action. The gov.uk site is an excellent resource for usability and accessibility and provided helpful ideas for creating an excellent user experience for Living Well Partnership. With the online triage, we wanted patients to be able to easily find the details for the service they needed to ensure that they get the right treatment quicker. In addition to reducing the number of calls and pressure on the reception team.

The online triage uses dynamic questions to share content with the user only when necessary, narrowing down the enquiry with simple questions and clear buttons, ending with a final page of content and specific information on the best next step. With many pages of content and hundreds of possible journeys we didn’t want to overwhelm the user with large menus and endless search results. We wanted the journey to feel organic and simple, making the technology do the hard work rather than the user.

Accessibility

To create an excellent user experience for all, you need to consider accessibility throughout a website development project. Considering the needs of all users requires thoughtful decision making. Across the whole project from the design, development and content production. As an NHS website the Living Well Partnership has to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 AA (WCAG). WCAG defines how to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities and impairments. Accessibility involves a wide range of impairments, including visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, language, learning, and neurological disabilities. This includes considered design decisions for colour palette, typography, spacing, layout and hierarchy. Within development it is important to ensure the website works well with assistive technologies (such as screen-readers), is performant, uses little animation/movement and is well considered responsively.

Security, uptime and redundancy

Personal data is more valuable than ever. Supporting the NHS means that the site needs to comply with a number of data and security standards. Specifically, within the registration form the site captures sensitive personal data, none of which is stored on a server. The data it captures is passed directly and securely to the main system. Removing additional vulnerabilities and keeping patient data safe.

We worked with our hosting partner Amito to ensure a secure hosting environment, with built in fail over. This ensures that key content will always be available to patients. Even if the server fails or the main site is down. The fail over page directs patients directly to eConsult to provide direct access to their surgery.