This project prompted the challenge to design the front page of a healthcare website for a therapist. The goal for this page was to tell their story as a professional and appeal to busy parents and guardians of teens dealing with mental health issue in New York City. I wanted to encourage users within that target audience to learn about the therapist, their services, and schedule an appointment with them.
For the design of this website, I wanted to make sure the color scheme was balanced, while also drawing inspiration from the New York City skyline to remain consistent with my theme. Besides thematic purposes, I also wanted to choose a color scheme that was optimal for usability purposes as well. I wanted to include warm/cool colors, saturated/muted colors, and light/dark colors. Another thing I wanted to make sure of was that there was enough contrast, since lack of contrast can lead to usability issues in digital products. As a general rule of thumb, I avoided pure black since that can be more visually jarring for users. This blue/red/orange color scheme was the final palette I decided to go with.
For this website, the target audience is geared towards families, but more specifically parents and guardians for children and teens dealing with anxiety, depression, and stress. Overall, the website is geared more towards mothers who are:
I ended up deviating from the layout of my first wireframe mainly at the top of the page. As I developed my content I realized I wanted to add a banner at the top and combine the logo with the navigation on the same bar, since I didn’t have that many links. Additionally, I wanted the header image to span across the entire width for greater impact. Besides that, I also made some changes in the rest of the layout once I realized what content, and what amount, was actually going in, and reorganized the layout to fill the content more reasonably.
Between my first and final draft, the layout for my services section changed as well. I was initially concerned with making the story of my page long enough, and didn’t really think about what would be more effective. When working on later drafts I realized that the one vertical column listing would be nice for the mobile layout, but for the desktop layout, it uses a lot of space that could be better used for something else. Instead I listed all three services in three columns and one row, spanning horizontally, so that users could easily view all the services at once and compare their options.
Between my first and final draft, my Testimonials section also slightly changed. When I initially planned the testimonials, I used filler text. Once I put in real content I realized there wasn’t that much writing and one testimonial across the whole screen was too little. I changed it to two testimonials to display across the screen to balance it out better, and instead of just a picture, I included the reviewer’s name and date that they posted, so that potential clients could see how recently the therapist worked with the client for better reference.
I designed a website that emphasizes the narrative of getting to know why this therapist is right for the potential client. The solution is effective because it has a clear story with themed sections that guides the user from start to finish with the therapist’s background, the services they offer, testimonials, their location in the big city, and multiple calls to actions weaved throughout the page. Through the color scheme, imagery, typography, sections and hierarchy tie everything together to form a cohesive identity. With calls to action encouraging users throughout the page, the site reveals more information with each section and informs users why this therapist’s service is right for them.
