Award Winning NHS Web Design & Development
Healthcare Organisation
Wide User Research
Web Development
Brief
Guys & St Thomas NHS Foundation Trust operates five main hospitals and serves over 2 million patients across London. The GSTT site needed to provide users with relevant information on the hospitals and their services, as well as communicate the organisational structure, vision and activity of each of the hospitals.
The goals were:
- an improved experience for website users
- improved performance of the website on different devices
- improved support for recruitment
- more effective use of centrally available content and tools provided via NHS Digital and the NHS website
- compliance with GDPR and EU accessibility standards
Through our commitment to these goals and dedicated Drupal development, Zoocha were able to launch an award winning platform for GSTT.
Discovery & Design
A comprehensive discovery and alpha phase involved engaging with over 700 users including those with accessibility needs and low levels of digital literacy. This involved 1-2-1 interviews, workshops and surveys to map the resulting information architecture and design of the platform.
Throughout 1-2-1 user testing, each design prototype increased in fidelity with each iteration of feedback from users and GSTT stakeholders. This resulted in hi-fi clickable prototypes that would be easily translated into development through leveraging Storybook as our front end library of choice. GSTT team members were invited to participate as passive observers in the testing process. This provided GSTT with a first hand experience of the user testing process, as well as direct insight into the user experience.
Technical highlights
Development had a strong focus on ensuring accessibility, through leveraging inhouse testing tools we were able to ensure WCAG2.2 compliance that has been verified by 3rd party audit.
Understanding that a number of users were often accessing the platform in times of urgency and distress, Zoocha ensured that the search functionality is as intuitive as possible. Leveraging Apache Solr, the GSTT search experience includes autocomplete and synonym support to support users when searching for complex medical terms, e.g. a search for ‘heart’ would yield ‘cardiology’ results. With several hospitals operating under one Trust, the GSTT team also have the ability to hide or exclude certain results under certain search terms, ensuring the user doesn’t see conflicting results for different hospitals. Furthermore, with a broad range of information on the GSTT site, allowing the search functionality to offer results within files improved the speed and accuracy of results.
Custom functionality has also included the ability for GSTT users to print pages or resources in adaptive styles that are automatically optimised for print. This includes the ability to combine pages into a single document as a ‘print this resource’ functionality. Due to the large range of complex content available on the platform ‘search and replace’ has been developed for the GSTT editor team to easily update terminology that may be used on multiple pages, reducing the time spent in manually updating content.
For further information on the technical specification of the platform please see our work published on Drupal.org.
Testimonial
Guy's & St Thomas' NHS Trust"The Zoocha team were lovely; the sprints were run really well, huge thanks to Hannah for how you did it. Great to have access to Figma, made the design process clearer to see how it was being put together"