If you live in Melbourne's west, you might be familiar with Western Health. Managing four acute public hospitals – Sunshine Hospital (including Joan Kirner Women’s and Children’s), Footscray Hospital, Bacchus Marsh Hospital, and Williamstown Hospital – Western Health is the common thread through the stories of countless people in the west.

Working together with patients, family members, staff, clinicians, volunteers and our community, the Western Health Foundation raises, manages and invests funds which helps Western Health to build better hospitals, care for community, enable world-leading research, and invest in staff development.

Until recently, the Foundation was summed up in a page on the Western Health site, but we worked together to create a devoted fundraising platform with more impact and more reach.

Strategy and user personas

Strategy workshops are always a goldmine of information and insight. It's a time to get together, revisit the brief, to talk about goals and challenges, and come together with a united vision and roadmap for the project.

Our work with Western Health Foundation was no different. In one workshop alone, we confirmed deliverables, goals and objectives, began to flesh out user personas, planned further user research and testing, reviewed some initial design research and IA thoughts, explored some design principles to guide us throughout the project, and agreed on some next steps.

Phew!

User testing

Once we had created basic prototypes for the new website, we engaged some users to help us test them. Testing with actual users (as opposed to simply gathering feedback from the client) is a great way to ensure the product meets their needs before spending too much time and resources producing the final product. It gives us confidence that we're designing and building the best possible solution, from an early stage of the project.

If you've never conducted or participated in user testing before, it usually works like this – a user is asked to perform a task on a mock-up of a website. It might be "buy a ticket to X event" or, in this case, "make a donation". Without giving the user instructions, we're able to watch as they navigate the site in search of what they're looking for, which tells us a lot about how usable (or not) the site is. Then we would ask them to talk us through their choices, and discuss anything that might have surprised them, frustrated them or even delighted them.

Design

It was important for the website to be inviting and inspiring, welcoming users into the world of Western Health and showing them what difference a donation can make. The navigation needed to be intuitive, the content clear and concise, and users needed to be able to find what they were looking for quickly and easily.

One of the key features of the new site is the "I am interested in..." module — this is a focal point of the home page and was the major piece of design/ux work. Designed to triage users and link them to the most relevant content, it's the centrepiece of much of the work conducted through the strategy workshop the user testing sessions. It ensures each user has a clear pathway to the content they need, right there on the front page of the website.

See the site

Our dev team has since launched the site, and we couldn't be happier with the outcome. We hope you'll take a look (and consider donating).

Check it out at whfoundation.org.au