New client website featured in Ragan’s Health Care News

A new website designed by Interval for Inova Health System (Falls Church, VA) was featured in the November 18 edition of Ragan’s Health Care News. The story, “Heart-centric microsite puts focus on patients,” features an interview with Chris Boyer, director of digital communications and marketing at Inova Health System, on the new website for Inova’s Heart & Vascular Institute.

“This isn’t a site about our heart and vascular institute,” Boyer says in the article. “This is a site for people in the community who are interested in their heart.”

The site features an intuitive navigation scheme developed by Interval that focuses first and foremost on who users are and why they might be visiting the site. The following four main navigation paths are used:

• “I want a healthier heart” – for those looking for heart health and wellness content
• “I need heart care” – for those looking for a physician or specific cardiovascular service
• “I am a patient or visitor” – for those already receiving care from IHVI and their family members
• “I am a physician” – for physicians looking to refer a cardiovascular patient

“One of the biggest problems with hospital websites is that they try to provide access to everything for everyone right from the home page, which typically leads to a very cluttered page and difficulty finding what you’re looking for,” says Chris Bevolo, president at Interval. “Our concept is to make it easy right off the bat to self-identify the best path for you, and because that’s very clear from the start, people will be able to find the content that’s most relevant to them much quicker.”

The new design and navigation scheme was a dramatic departure from the previous site design, and helped move the organization away from structuring content based on internal perspectives, instead structuring content based on user perspectives.

“Our old website was more inwardly focused,” Boyer says in the article. “It was focused on the hospital’s awards and accolades. We weren’t paying attention to what the community was looking for.”

Proof that this concept is working can be found in dramatically reduced bounce rates for the IHVI landing page, says Bevolo. In the first two months since the new site has launched, the bounce rate for the landing page is 53%, which is significantly lower than the 88% bounce rate for the same period in 2010 on the old site.

“That tells us that people are sticking around because they’re finding what they need more easily, rather than becoming frustrated and leaving right away,” says Bevolo. “The average time visitors spend on the site has almost doubled from the prior year, rising from 1 minute, 13 seconds to 2 minutes, 13 seconds, another sign that the site design is more compelling.”