Seattlechildrens.org Redesign

October 22, 2003 | Comments Closed

So we launched an updated, redesigned, re-architected and rebuilt Seattlechildrens.org recently and I thought I’d let you all know about it.

First things first. The site is built with Web standards fully in mind. For you geeks out there, the vast majority of the pages validate XHTML 1.0 Transitional and while it’s not 100% tableless, the majority is coded semantically and it’s set up very well for the future. It was no easy task but well worth it, already are the benefits beginning to pay off.

I’m pretty sure it’s the first site of it’s kind to be coded this way - I could be wrong, but I’ve not found another hospital or major health care system site built in this way. If you know of another or are working on one yourself I’d love to chat. Hopefully this site can serve as an example to an industry who’s sites can reap huge benefits from Web standards.

This site is the initial result of quite a bit of hard work by myself and the rest of the Web team, the marketing department and many other great folks down at the hospital. Quite a bit of work has gone into not only rebuilding and redesigning the site, but re-architecting it, making it user-centric and adding / updating all of our great content.

It’s a huge site that has multiple audiences, each with it’s own specific needs. Probably the most important things we did for this site was to break the site into four distinct audience sections.

We then took each section and did user research and testing, built personas, conducted a content audit, interviewed content creators and stakeholders, conducted findability exercises and reconstructed the IA for the whole site based on those four distinct user-focused areas.

Anyone who has worked in health care knows the conflicts that can arise from the separation of administrative, clinical, parent, patient and all the rest. It was a long and ultimately fruitful exercise. In the end the integrity of the IA for these sections broke-down somewhat due to various reasons, but all in all it seems to be working great.

Big props need to go out to our marketing folks for jumping in and taking the Web and all it’s particularities head on. Also to Phinney Bischoff for their hard work and the amazing photos. They were great to work with.

And of course, last but not least (not by a long-shot) the rest of the team. Great work, all. Lot’s of work to be done, but this is a huge step toward the future.

Filed under: Web General