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Challenge
Bring the inspiring personality and spirit of Craig Hospital online, while helping potential patients and their families see why Craig Hospital is more than a place where they can begin to heal — it’s a place where they can thrive.
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Solution
Conduct extensive in-person interviews with stakeholders, patients, and their primary caregivers to understand Craig Hospital inside and out and learn how to best tell the amazing success stories of its patients.
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Results
A flexible, modular, and responsive online experience that brings the hospital to life with rich visuals and a modern, intuitive design, so potential patients and their caregivers can truly get to know Craig Hospital.
Bringing hope to life. Craig Hospital is a world-renowned rehabilitation center that specializes exclusively in treating spinal cord injuries and traumatic brain injuries. Nearly 30,000 patients with spinal cord injuries and traumatic brain injuries have been treated there since 1956 — more than any other facility in the country. This isn’t your typical hospital — the close-knit community and inspiring atmosphere make it a joyful place that’s full of life. We worked with the Craig Hospital team to highlight that positive spirit throughout their new site, and to help them share the remarkable recovery stories of their patients. Our goal was to make it easy for potential patients and their families to see why Craig Hospital is more than a place where they can begin to heal — it’s a place where they can thrive.
Areas of Expertise
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Getting Personal and Analytical
We met with stakeholders representing departments from across the hospital so we could understand their roles within the larger organization, discover their pain points with the current website, and learn how they hoped the website would evolve. We met with a cross-section of patients and their primary caregivers and talked to them about how they discovered Craig Hospital, why they choose it as their rehabilitation facility, and what their experience was like. We also reviewed analytics data to better understand current use of the site.
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Reassuring Caregivers
Although the content across the site would be relevant for all audiences, our strategy was to focus the content, tone, and approach around the caregivers and loved ones of potential patients, to give them the reassurance and clear direction they need.They were most likely looking at the site for the first time on a mobile device while stuck in the ICU, dealing with the reality of an incredibly traumatic incident, and trying to make difficult decisions about care and treatment — they had to be able to find the information they needed and get a real picture of what life and treatment at Craig Hospital is like. An intuitive, responsive design would make finding information easy. Telling the stories of current and past patients would help caregivers see what life at Craig was like.
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Visually Rich, But Never Overwhelming
Because Craig Hospital is such an inspiring, positive place, we landed on a design direction that was bright, lively, and rich in imagery, that would bring the hospital’s personality into the site. Knowing that they have a photographer and videographer in-house allowed us to pursue a highly visual design approach that included placing large imagery front and center on the site. This compelling imagery helped us make an emotional connection with users and give Craig’s patients a real face.
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Modules to Make It Easy
The Craft content management system worked well because it comes with a large amount of functionality out of the box and makes it easy to add and manage content. Using Matrix fields, we provided the Craig team with a modular approach to many of the interior pages which gave them the flexibility to build their own cohesive, engaging pages easily.
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A Flexible System to Tell Unique Stories
We crafted a patient story template that provides space to tell the story of an individual patient’s experience and success, and places a strong emphasis on imagery and video. We included optional modules like quotes, media galleries, and treatment highlights so no two story pages are the same.
Summary
Our extensive preliminary research and thoughtful design approach enabled us to create a new online home for Craig Hospital that not only tells the story of Craig’s unique culture and inspiring patient community, but also meets the specific technological and navigational needs of the site’s primary audience of patient caregivers.
