Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Foundation Trust's websites

Situation:
The RB&HFT has an internationally renowned research reputation and is the leading hospital in cardiovascular and respiratory research in the UK and arguably Europe. Their current website is dated and a poor reflection of this superior status; furthermore it has become massively bloated with legacy and duplicate content, and usability is poor, as is device responsiveness.

Their Specialist Care website, which covers private care, is better but again does not represent its status well; it also appears as disparate from the main NHS site.

RB&HFT commissioned Affinity to redesign and develop two new websites to address these shortcomings. Their aspiration is to develop a pair of websites which exemplify their leading status.

The sites must cater for patient users of all ages and demographics, as well as academics, professionals, national and international agencies etc. Governance is also extremely important. 

A final challenges is the potentially conflicting priorities between the NHS steering group, and the commercial priorities of the private Specialist Care team.

Solution:
The massively varying ages, backgrounds and abilities of users has made discovery, UX and design a particular focus. Much discovery work has been done to underpin the design in the form of multiple discovery workshops, on-site user interviews, online surveys and telephone interviews.

Our designers have worked with RB&HFT’s content teams to audit and prioritise content, define user journeys and formalise sitemaps. 

Designs have moved through page descriptions to wireframes, and initial style sheets into full page designs.

User stories define functionality, and the base build is in place.

Results:
The NHS website project is now live and has met with measured approval (via on-line and off-line surveys and one-to-ones) from Key stakeholders, staff, patients and academia alike The private specialist are website is currently undergoing a detailed phase of user testing. This includes remote first-click and on-site task-based testing to validate that the design is appealing and intuitive, that it efficiently signposts users and that language and labelling is meaningful.