Healthcare Innovation Center
role
UI, Branding
client
CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, LifeBridge Health
year
2019
Objective
The Innovation Center is a collaboration between the leading payor, CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, and community health system, LifeBridge Health. It will function as a co-working space and incubator program designed to foster an ecosystem of entrepreneurship that improves healthcare access, positively impacts patient outcomes, and reduces the total cost of care. CareFirst and LifeBridge Health came to Bytelion in need of a digital presence for the opening of their innovation center. The website needed to provide a clear description of the center’s mission and purpose as well as foster a sense of ingenuity and innovation. CareFirst and LifeBridge Health needed the primary function of the website to be driving form leads from potential participants and investors. The website needed to reflect both company’s brands in a way that was cohesive and fluid.
Creative Process
Upon acceptance of the project, the Bytelion team knew that the coming-together of these two larger organizations meant that we would have to facilitate a design workshop with both organizational stakeholders present.
Before the workshop began, we sent out a list of discovery questions to each organization that would answer some preliminary questions including their long-term goals and what they thought the role of the Innovation Center was to be.
With some answers in hand, we planned out the day-long design workshop and met up with both organizations on common ground. We began the workshop by reviewing the discovery questions and answers we had received so that both parties could better understand each other’s goals. Then, we moved on to a competitive website analysis. I ran through five competing healthcare incubation/co-working space websites, asking both organizations to shout out what they thought did and did not work for those websites. What we found was that both organizations wanted their website to use approachable language and elements that encouraged a sense of community, keep the sheer amount of information to a minimum, and feature news articles written about the Innovation Center. Using the competitive website analysis, we created a list of desired features and voted on the most important. It was clear that imagery and evidence of community activity such as events, news, and social media were present on the website.
Next, we moved on to creating user personas and journeys as a group and then we analyzed all of the personas and journeys and created one “main” persona that we felt embodied the average target audience. Our collaborative findings indicated that our target user is about 30-years old, is a graduate student and possibly an entrepreneur, CEO, or founder. In addition, their possible touch-points with the website would include, searching the internet for “Baltimore co-working spaces” and submitting an application because the center has the resources to help them succeed.
With our user persona and competitive analysis in-hand, we created an information architecture concept as a group that focused on the high-level information the website would convey. This largely included information about the Innovation Center itself, such as its mission, offerings and support, events and news. In addition, they wanted their application form to target potential participants, partners, mentors and investors.
The information architecture helped guide our next activity, concept solution sketching. Every participant had the pleasure of choosing their most desired feature and sketching a solution for that feature alone as well as a solution for the landing page as a whole. When sketching concluded, everyone had a chance to review the anonymous solutions in silence and vote for their favorites. Doing this anonymously with no discussion allowed us to avoid bias between the organizations.
Our last activity of the day was geared toward mediating a branding discussion between the two organizations. Fortunately, both organizations had a similar look-and-feel in mind for their Innovation Center website. Ultimately, they wanted it to combine both of their brand colors and styles and emphasize modern, advanced, and cutting-edge tones. Luckily, the brand of both organizations aligned very well. The hardest part of the branding discussion was getting them to agree on whose logo would come first! Ultimately, CareFirst one this battle because they were the primary stakeholder.
The branding discussion concluded our day-long design workshop. With all of this information in-hand, I began creating wireframes using Adobe XD because of its sharing capabilities that would help the stakeholders provide feedback remotely and our developer to meet design specifications. The low-fidelity wireframes were used by LifeBridge Health to write the web copy for the landing page. The high-fidelity wireframes proved to be the most sensitive. I had to empathetically combine both brands in a way that represented the organizations as a whole and felt modern and cutting edge. When the high-fidelity wireframes reached final approval and all content was incorporated, they were handed off to development for implementation.
Results
The website went live in November 2019 and has since drawn much attention from the healthcare and tech industries, respectively. Unfortunately, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the grand opening of the Innovation Center was pushed from Spring 2020 to Fall 2020. However, this has given CareFirst and LifeBridge Health more time to prepare for their grand opening and optimize the website for new open positions.The new logo accurately represented the brand's values and appealed to their target audience. The business reported increased website traffic and social media engagement, and the logo was featured in several local publications.
