Completed Drupal site or project URL: https://surgery.ucsf.edu/An intuitive user experience that reassures patients and inspires future residents.
The Department of Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco is one of the leading surgical departments in the world with a rich history of scientific, educational, and clinical advancements. Although their care is primarily dedicated to the people of the San Francisco Bay Area (with six major area hospitals), their reputation draws patients nationally and internationally. UCSF surgeons perform a high volume of advanced, complex and technically challenging procedures. This allows them to continually improve their skills, resulting in better outcomes for patients.
The Challenge
The Department of Surgery consisted of over 80+ domains ranging from research-focused, to patient-focused, to those geared towards residents. All were built using a proprietary CMS with no cohesive way to navigate between the various domains. Even worse, many of the domains/departments were creating their own layouts, navigation, and design signals, so there was little consistency between them.
There was also no content strategy whatsoever. Most site users identified as patients and their family members trying to learn more about specific conditions and procedures, which drove organic traffic to pages other than the homepage. But those pages weren’t easy to navigate, and visitors encountered many content dead-ends — with no idea where to go next. Meanwhile, the homepage had become cluttered;, with many competing inline links and no clear content hierarchy.
The CMS didn’t provide an easy way to share content, requiring editors to do extra work recreating content for each domain. The content itself didn't serve any audience needs; it lacked patient-friendly language and didn’t inspire potential residents to apply or take further action.
UCSF needed an inspiring design worthy of their status as a world-class medical school with a growing, innovative and diverse environment. Their new website would need overall consistency, a proper content hierarchy, and a back-end structure that provided both long-term sustainability and flexibility for content editors.
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