A Medical Consulting Group’s Website Goes Under the Knife
BSM Consulting Website and Portal Redesign
OVERVIEW
BSM Consulting is a health care consulting company that offers services and resources for medical practices on a wide range of topics. They provide guidance on everything from general business operations (e.g. financial management, human resources, leadership, strategic planning, etc.) to the specific needs of specialists (e.g. ambulatory surgery centers, ophthalmology, aesthetic dermatology & plastic surgery practices, etc.). A combination of membership programs, distance learning courses, and customized consulting services position BSM Consulting as one of the top health care business management consultants around the globe.
KEY ACHIEVEMENTS
+14.48%
Session duration-14%
Bounce rates+12.14%
Pages per sessionWorking hand in hand with BSM Consulting, we consolidated content that was spread across 5 different websites to create a single, cohesive online experience.
Discovery
BSM Consulting offers a wealth of digital products, however, their various consulting services and membership programs were previously all housed under different roofs.
Due to a smattering of mergers and acquisitions, each offering had its own website, leading to a poor and disjointed user experience. This was exacerbated by poor checkout flows integrated through Infusionsoft, and a slew of other issues BSM Consulting came to us to resolve.
Our deep discovery process consisted of multiple key stakeholder interviews, content audits, analytics analyses, and stakeholder usability studies. Before getting into UX and design, we needed to make sure we had a firm understanding of how the entire BSM Consulting ecosystem worked together so we could better organize everything under the new website.
We spent the bulk of our time learning BSM Consulting’s current offerings/product matrix and conducting audits on their 5 different websites. Starting with an understanding of the current state of their product offerings laid the foundation needed to create a successful consolidation strategy.
before
UX Strategy
Since the single biggest challenge we had to tackle during this project was how to organize the overwhelming amount of content BSM Consulting had spread across 5 different websites, defining the information architecture and website taxonomy was the first thing we focused on after completing our deep discovery.
Creating and iterating on a sitemap helped our team understand what the structure of the new site would be.
Once the sitemap was in place, we jumped into fleshing out the actual content that would live on each page. This was helped by creating wireframes to define exactly how we wanted to lay out the content across the custom page templates. The wireframe prototype also allowed us to begin testing the flow of the redesign to ensure it was easy to navigate and provided a great user experience.
One of the most important pieces of our planning phase was mapping out the ecommerce flows for each of the membership programs. Each program had a unique flow, and required extreme attention to detail to make things as straight-forward and simple as possible. It also gave us an incredible opportunity to utilize proven design patterns that encourage visitors to continue through the sales funnel to conversion.
Build
With the UX strategy firmly in place, we started designing the site. BSM Consulting didn’t provide us with any style guide, but just pointed us in the right direction by providing their brand colors and fonts.
Using their color palette as a reference, we built out an entire visual language library to use across the site which included design fonts, patterns, imagery styles, gradients, and custom iconography, essentially building a full brand guide for them.
Due to the many moving pieces, the development was a complex build. We built the site on top of the ASP.NET framework, and every module was 100% custom. By utilizing .NET, we were able to have complete control over the content management system (CMS), which met BSM Consulting’s requirements for custom reporting and admin roles.
To empower BSM Consulting to self-manage their site in the future, we integrated a page builder. With the page builder, they can modify and adapt the site as their business continues to change and grow by creating new pages from scratch using either a full page template or pre-designed page sections. This way, they have the flexibility to decide how they want the page to look while keeping the look and feel consistent and cohesive with the rest of the site.
For the distance learning portion of the site, we integrated via API with Totara, which is a web-based Learning Management Systems (LMS). We worked in close collaboration with the team from Totara to connect the sites together so that user access, permissions, and data would be passed seamlessly between the .NET site we built and Totara’s database.
Test & Launch
After development was complete, we worked closely with the team from BSM Consulting to test the site, make any last minute adjustments, and enter content.
We spent a great deal of time testing each of the many user flows to be confident the site was free of bugs.
Transitioning user data from BSM Consulting’s legacy systems into the new database was a very time-consuming and painstaking process. We worked extremely hard double checking the data after import so we could ensure all their existing users would be able to create a new username, log in, and access what they had already paid for after the new site went live.
Once we were confident that there were no additional bugs to be found, we were ready to launch the site.
Closing Thoughts
We had our work cut out for us, but thanks to the close collaboration with the team at BSM Consulting and our deep knowledge of UX, web design, and web development, we were able to transform their online presence into a vibrant, healthy, and engaging experience.
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