Pacific Diabetes Technology Website Redesign
My team and I were tasked with redesigning the website for Pacific Diabetes Technology, a biotech company based in Portland, OR. The company makes a streamlined device that both tests your blood sugar levels and delivers insulin, which has previously been done with two separate devices. At the time of this redesign, they had received their patent and were working toward FDA approval.
Our Roles
While we all shared the workload evenly, we did assign our four team members to four different roles. Each team member was in charge of making sure whichever part of the project they were assigned got completed.
Ashley: Interviews and user tests
Amy: Research synthesis
Megan (that’s me): Website copy
Elizabeth: Design and prototyping
Research
My team began our project by sitting down with our client and getting more information about the company as a whole as well as what goals they wanted us to accomplish.
Since this was the first time my team would be working with a client in healthcare, we wanted to make sure we understood Pacific Diabetes Technology’s device and market offering, so we scheduled a stakeholder interview. Along with understanding the device more clearly, we were told there were some specific requirements we would need to adhere to on our end to make it clear to users that the device was not yet ready for use.
With the stakeholder interview done, we conducted five usability tests on the current site to identify pain points and issues with the current functionality of the site.
Synthesizing the Research
Our stakeholder interview highlighted some problems the client wanted us to address. One of their main goals in a website redesign was to increase credibility for their product and to get more people signed up to receive news on product updates and launching. As they were currently raising funds to get their product approved by the FDA, they wanted to make it clear where they were at in the process and where they were heading.
Our own usability tests turned up a few pain points we knew we wanted to address. The website had a confusing layout, and there were few (if any) calls to action. The menu items weren’t clearly defined and the navigation hierarchy was unclear and inconsistent.
But a big opportunity we saw was that there was a lot of very good information that was found only in videos. PDT is doing some amazing things, but it wasn’t immediately clear what those things were.
We built an affinity diagram to boil down our user interviews and get all the feedback in one place. As we were working remotely for this project, we used Miro for most of our brainstorming/collaboration work.
We then created our user persona to give us a direction for our website design. Ben Parish was a 53 year old from Indianapolis who was interested in diabetes research after watching his mother struggle to manager her diabetes. That along with a user journey map gave us a strong jumping off point for our design.
Goals
Create frequent and clear calls to action for consumers to engage. Specifically, invite users to sign up for the Pacific Diabetes Technology newsletter.
Pull the good information that is currently only in videos on the site and present it in an easily digestible manner for those scrolling. This is also going to give us some more robust website copy (oh yea).
Increase consumer confidence. Generally clean up the website layout and make the navigation hierarchy and site mapping clean and consistent.
Design
Now for the fun part. Once we identified our goals, we began our first iterations of our design. Starting with paper prototypes and working to hi-fidelity mockups, we conducted five user tests at each iteration of the design.
Our design needed to be professional and convey assurance and reliability. This is a medical device, and people needed to trust it. But we also wanted to avoid being stuffy and needed to communicate that this device was to make you live your life easier. We came up with the idea of a blue color palette to match the colors of the PDT device and, to add life and personality to the website, we had small pops of a warm yellow signifying vitality and joy.
We also incorporated rounded edges to appear less severe and to hint that this device will help you live life at your rhythm, on your wavelength.
As I was in charge of website copy, I spent a lot of time finding the right words for our site navigation and to strike that perfect balance between professional and approachable. Our voice was meant to be welcoming to all—we wanted to invite anyone who was interested to get more information about PDT’s device. We also needed to convey trustworthiness and to encourage engagement. In short, we wanted to be informative, clear, and friendly.
And we couldn’t be more thrilled with the final result!
We incorporated the wave into a lot of the website to soften the image of our product and indicate that PDT delivers a product that helps the rhythm of your life. The soft blues are an ode to where PDT is located in the Pacific Northwest, and gives a calming and reassuring presence.
We prominently displayed important information, used simple icons to give a lot of information to those who might be scrolling, and incorporated many opportunities for customer involvement with frequent calls to action.
Client Feedback:
"I provided general guidance to the group on the content and feel that we wanted from our website. Our industry, product and the audiences of our website make for particularly challenging messaging both in terms of language, color palette and imagery. The team was able to methodically work through the project and come up with a solution that conveyed the appropriate content without sacrificing either the human element or important technical details that differentiate our product. They were good communicators, actively and willingly listened for feedback. They are well on their way to becoming valuable professionals in their field. Perhaps the most important validation of their efforts is that we will be able to make use of the content they produced."
What I learned
One of the things I love about UX and UI is that it is a perfect response to the design principle “form follows function.” In conducting research first, we as designers got to find what the function of the site would be first. From there, we got to problem solve before ever creating a design. I personally, create best when I have good reasoning behind what I’m making, and have good parameters to follow. This project gave me both of those, and I got to push myself in the design because of it.
As this was the first large-scale team project I got to work on, I learned how to balance creative energies well. We all had something unique to bring to the table.