With so many design trends predicted for 2020 and beyond healthcare marketing teams should look inward to determine what’s valuable for your web presence. Design trends are not always one size fits all, and the decision to incorporate any trend into your website depends heavily on your users’ needs, as well as your organization’s mission and brand.
Five Web Design Trends Worth Your Attention
Trends focused on supporting intuitive experiences, giving users the information they are seeking with ease, are always in style. Savvy organizations are finding new ways to use design to tell their brand stories and better connect with their audiences, uniquely differentiating themselves from their competition.
What does this mean to healthcare marketers and your websites? Today, patients want convenience, exceptional care, and remote access. A first impression online that provides users with a convenient, intuitive, easy access to their top tasks can potentially kick-start a successful patient journey and ongoing, positive relationship. Design, if accompanied by the right content, will help produce this experience.
Here are the top five design trends for 2020 that healthcare marketers should pay attention to and how your organization could benefit from incorporating some of these into your web strategy.
#1: Inclusive design
Accessibility is an important topic in healthcare web design right now. But stepping back and thinking about accessibility as part of the bigger theme of inclusive design is really where your focus should be. Considering the needs of a diverse population provides a better understanding of your audience.
Building inclusive thinking into the design process early will ultimately provide a better user experience for all visitors on your site, as well as save money and time by not having to retrofit your site to meet accessibility standards. For example, consider color contrast, alternative text for images, text resizing capabilities and many other standards to make your site more accessible. Listen to our on-demand webinar on Website Accessibility and Healthcare to learn more.
#2: Minimalism
Minimalism isn’t a new concept. It’s about expressing only the most essential and necessary elements in a design. This translates into website designs that use space intentionally between elements as to not overload the user, displaying the information users are truly seeking, and making their click path more easily identifiable.
Minimalism is just as much about the functionality as we see more experiences allowing for one-tap registration and instant payment. This comes to mind when thinking about a patient’s click path for actions such as scheduling an appointment, finding a doctor, registering for an event or making an online bill payment. Using minimalism effectively can lead the user through the page by organizing the content and providing balance among the other design elements.
#3: Purposeful micro-interactions
Micro-interactions are small design elements with a single purpose that create engaging, welcoming and human moments for users while interacting with your site. These elements tend to communicate status and provide feedback, helping users see the results of their actions. Popular micro-interactions include simple animations, swipe actions, animated buttons, and call to actions that have a bit of action associated with them, nudging the user to interact.
Micro-interactions can strengthen a brand’s representation based on its active visual and motion design, creating an attached emotion for the user. Visitors can customize their experience based on how they choose to interact with the site. It is important to know your users well in order to serve them effectively with interactions that enhance their overall experience and not take away from it.
#4: Tailored experiences
New devices are inevitable as technology continues to advance and design will continue to adapt as necessary along with it. Web design will have new opportunities to create unique, relevant experiences for users, such as with foldable, touchable displays, voice user interfaces, and personalization based on collected data.
Traditional care is shifting along with technology and with more patients utilizing the convenience of telehealth and other remote healthcare resources, organizations will need to rethink how to best design and create experiences to meet their patients’ needs.
#5: Custom, brand-driven elements
Some of the more visually focused design trends are including dark layouts, diverse typography, and custom illustrations. Dark mode, or using light-colored text, icons, and graphical user interface elements on a darker background, is becoming a popular option, especially as trend-setters Apple and Slack have been embracing it. Dark mode can provide a more enjoyable user experience, drawing the content out and creating a sleek, bezel-less display or illusion on mobile that your website’s design goes from one edge to the other.
Designs are also experimenting more with typography after many years of bold, lowercase sans-serif typefaces. Typography is seeing a bit of rejuvenation with artistic executions and unlikely combinations. Additionally, purposeful, custom illustrations and brand elements are on the rise, translating information to incite emotion to take action and strengthening the brand identity.
Create a great design experience
Deciding whether or not to include design trends into your website is dependent on your organization’s and users’ needs. Regardless of what you decide, use design as a tool to produce the positive experience intended for your site’s visitors and effectively tell your brand story.
And remember, if you’re unsure of how to move forward with your web and design strategy, call in the experts. And, be sure to check out our Digital Marketing Trends to Watch in 2020 webinar for more discussion on healthcare marketing and web design trends.
Brie Lovelace
