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Top 12 Healthcare Website Design Trends in 2021

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Originally Posted On: https://www.12sm.agency/healthcare-website-design/

 

Your patients expect you to have a quality website that is easy to navigate and aesthetically pleasing. In addition, your website is the first impression they have of your healthcare institution, so it’s essential to nail its aesthetics and portray an image of confidence and professionalism.

In fact, research from Forrester shows that improving the user interface (UI) of your website can increase conversions by 200%, and a quality user experience (UX) can improve conversions by up to 400%.

A quality user experience will not only boost conversions and engagement, but it will also help you rank higher in Google as they plan to release a significant user experience update in 2021.

Therefore, if you want to increase patient volume and quality in 2021, investing in quality website design is essential. About 70% of web designers update their client’s websites at least once every quarter, so it’s vital to have a modern design to keep up with your competition.

We put together a list of some of the hottest healthcare website design trends that can help you succeed in 2021. Use these website design trends to learn how to improve user experience, boost conversions, and instantly distinguish your company as an industry leader.

1. Healthcare Website Design Trends: Minimalism

As a healthcare business, it’s essential to project a clean and neat image to potential patients. Therefore, minimalism will certainly be a trend in 2021.

Minimalism also helps a website load faster, which will improve user experience and increase engagement. In fact, research shows that a website that loads in 2 seconds has an average bounce rate of 9%, while those that load in 5 seconds have an average bounce rate of 38%. Minimalism also provides fewer distractions. By reducing distractions, you can keep the patient focused on your call to actions (CTAs) and increase conversions.

Doxy.me is a perfect example of a minimalist web design that maintains the user’s focus and provides an excellent experience.

 

How to Incorporate Minimalism

To incorporate minimalism, audit your website by looking at these factors:

  • Is white the primary color on your website?
  • Are there more than two other primary colors on your website?
  • Do you use more than three different fonts and font colors?

If your audit reveals that your design could be improved, consider hiring a website designer to fix them for you.

You can hire a freelancer from platforms like Upwork, though most freelancers simply follow requests, so you’ll have to spell out exactly what changes you want (change header fronts on pages x,y, and z from Alegreya to Open Sans…). As you can see, this process requires quite a bit of work and design knowledge on your end.

Another option is to hire an agency. For example, from a simple chat, we can get determine the broader vision you’re aiming for, and we’ll handle the design details.

2. Healthcare Website Design Trend: Voice User Interface

Almost 40% of millennials already use voice assistants, so it’s no surprise that voice user interface will be a healthcare website design trend in 2021.

OhioHealth Urgent Care has an excellent example of a voice user interface (VUI) on their website. Their VUI allows patients to ask Alexa about wait times, locations, and more which not only improves patient experience but also cuts down on unnecessary phone calls to the front desk.

However, there are many other ways healthcare companies can use VUI.

For example, VUI can assist with billing, patient portal support, and prescription refills.

How to Incorporate Voice User Interface

To incorporate VUI, start by analyzing your customer journey map.

A customer journey map shows how potential patients find you and interact with your brand online and offline. When analyzing the customer journey, look at:

  • Commonly asked chat, phone and email questions
  • Common patient support complaints
  • Your current consultation scheduling systems

From there, you can hire a UX designer from Toptal or Upwork to build your VUI.

One tip is to avoid creating a VUI around a question that typically has follow-up questions. Voice is similar to chatbots as it uses artificial intelligence, so it’s best to build a VUI that deals with simple queries like:

  • What insurance do you accept?
  • When is the next available appointment?
  • What is your clinic’s address?
3. Healthcare Website Design Trend: Comfortable Colors

Another healthcare website design trend for 2021 is using a comfortable color scheme.

Your website’s color directly impacts how patients view your brand’s personality, so it’s essential to analyze your color selection carefully.

For example, white evokes safety and professionalism. As your main goal is to make your patients feel secure with your brand, you’ll notice that many quality healthcare websites are designed with white space.

However, other comfortable colors you can use include lighter shades of blue and green. Blue is known for evoking calmness, serenity, and tranquility, while green evokes positive emotions of growth, excitement, and safety (likely due to its association with nature).

Therefore, use comfortable colors across your website and place the most intense colors around your CTA. Using lighter shades will increase the color’s calming effect, so avoid bright or bold colors of any shade.

Baylor Scott and White is a great example of a website that uses mostly light blue and white colors to portray safety, calmness, and professionalism.

 

How to Incorporate Comfortable Colors

To incorporate comfortable colors into your website design, use a tool like a11y. This tool will show you if you have any colors that are starkly contrasting.

 

However, as this tool only detects contrast, it’s still important that you eyeball the site. For example, while black and white contrast well, a mostly black website could be intimidating. Therefore, use a combination of both this tool and your own eyes.

 

4. Healthcare Website Design Trend: Bold and Clear Typography

Another design trend that will continue to thrive in 2021 is bold typography. Your website exists to help people learn more about your company, though if your typography is too light or difficult to read, it will frustrate your user and increase your bounce rate.

If you can’t read your web page’s headline from across the room, it probably isn’t bold or large enough.

Your paragraphs should also be large enough to read about two feet from your computer, and they should be no more than a few lines.

In addition, consider using open forms to improve clarity.

 

While it isn’t necessarily a new font, you’ll likely continue to see a lot more of Sans Serif on healthcare websites in 2021 as it’s a safe, clear typography that exudes professionalism.

Finally, avoid using more than three different fonts, as too much variety will confuse the reader and harm the website’s aesthetics.

Northwestern Medicine is a great example of a website with bold and clear typography that you can easily read.

 

How to Incorporate Bold and Clear Typography

To identify and clean up the typography on your website, install a tool like WhatFont. WhatFont is a chrome extension that allows you to see the font any website is using and its color, weight, and size.

Therefore, if you see a font and typography style on another website that you like, you can then incorporate it into your website.

5. Healthcare Website Design Trend: Smart Content Loading

By 2021, you’re already using responsive design, though another more recent trend is lazy loading.

Unlike eager loading, which forces the entire page to load and negatively impacts pagespeed, lazy loading only loads the content the user is currently viewing.

 

Therefore, lazy loading ultimately improves page speed, which can aid your SEO and decrease bounce rates.

In fact, pages that load within two seconds have an average bounce rate of 9%, while pages that take five seconds to load have an average bounce rate of 38%.

Lazy loading is typically used on pages that have a high volume of images, videos, or other media.

How to Incorporate Lazy Loading

Adding lazy loading to your website is likely something you’ll have to send to a developer, though you can check if your website has lazy loading on your own.

Simply scroll down and watch if the images load as you scroll. If you currently have eager loading, the page will probably take a while to load and then shows all of the images without delay.

Insert GIF https://blog.hubspot.com/website/lazy-loading-eager-loading

6. Healthcare Website Design Trend: Add Human Elements

While advancements in online communication have made it possible to complete most interactions online, many patients now miss the personalization of live interactions and often feel more like numbers than humans. In addition, the Coronavirus pandemic has added to the sense of alienation. As a healthcare provider, it’s more important than ever to make the website appear human.

One of the easiest ways to make your website look more human is to add a real image of a patient or medical professional to the homepage.

In fact, research shows that pictures of people’s faces can dramatically increase engagement.

However, it’s important to use a real photo of an employee or patient (with their name) as original images generate 35% more conversions than stock photos.

Children’s National is a great example of bringing humanity into web design.

 

How to Incorporate Human Elements

If you have a large website (for example, a hospital website), start by looking at just the main pages. Place the image at the top of the page (typically on the banner) as most people never scroll to the bottom.

An ideal image would be a patient and staff member interaction. If you don’t have any at the moment, see if you can get someone to take some pictures and send them to you. You can then edit it with a tool like Canva to create a banner of the patient/employee like the one above.

 

7. Healthcare Website Design Trend: Purposeful Microinteractions

Microinteractions are a major healthcare website design trend for 2021. They are a great way to engage your visitor and add an extra level of professionalism to your website.

For example, if you have a page that loads slowly, you can create an entertaining page that keeps users engaged and reduces bounce rates:

via GIPHY

Another example of a micro interaction is the animated chat bubbles when someone is typing to you. This gives you peace of mind and keeps you engaged rather than waiting impatiently, and ultimately leaving the website.

Here’s an example of a micro interaction that also helps increase time on site and engagement by showing the reader what to do next (read the next post).

via GIPHY

Microinteractions shouldn’t be noticeable or distract the user from what they are looking for on your website. Rather, they exist to interest the reader and increase engagement.

How to Incorporate Microinteractions

Creating micro interactions is very easy. You can use tools like PrincipleFramer, or Flinto to transform any image or graphic into an animated micro interaction.

Once you become comfortable using these apps, it typically only takes a few minutes to create a micro interaction. However, don’t abuse the tool and make the website cluttered with meaningless animations. Use it sparingly and only for key places where readers bounce.

8. Healthcare Website Design Trend: Stacking Slides

While it used to be trendy to have a slideshow on your healthcare center’s homepage, you’ll see far fewer websites with rotating slides or rotating carousels in 2021. Visitors are conditioned to scroll rather than click through slides, so most patients never see your second slide.

In fact, plenty of studies show that these slides frustrate visitors because they can’t immediately find what they need.

Instead, stacking slides will be the new healthcare website design trend in 2021.

Baptist Health has a great example of stacking slides.

To determine if people are using your carousels, you can install a heatmap like Hotjar or Crazyegg and watch as people interact with your website. If you notice that none of them stop to scroll through your carousels, it’s a good idea to turn those slides into stacked slides.

How to Incorporate Stacking Slides

Rather than redesigning your entire website, simply take the carousel or sliders you currently have and move them down the page.

You can break it up with white space to create a more minimalist design. Or, if you find that some of your slides don’t add value, you can delete them altogether.

9. Healthcare Website Design Trend: Tall Pages

Another web design trend that is returning for 2021 is tall pages. Replacing shorter pages or paginated pages with a tall page is particularly important for conversion-related pages, like a procedure page.

Rather than creating pages that offer bite-sized chunks of information, tall pages enable you to answer all of the visitor’s questions in one location rather than making them find various other pages on your website.

CrazyEgg has a famous case study where they replaced a short page with a tall page that was 20 times longer. As a result, their conversions increased by 30%.

You can see that many service pages, such as this one, offer virtually all the information a patient could possibly want on the subject without ever needing to click elsewhere.

In addition, longer pages (that are more thorough) tend to rank better on Google, so you’ll enjoy a nice SEO boost by combining relevant pages.

How to Incorporate Tall Pages

Consider combining multiple thin pages into one tall page on a topic and adding a table of contents to the page.

For example, rather than having multiple pages on breastfeeding, this guide has a table of contents and covers every topic imaginable on breastfeeding.

 

Fortunately, adding a table of contents is very easy with the Fixed TOC plugin. Once you’ve installed the plugin, it’s very easy to use. Go to:

Settings > Fixed TOC > General > (select your post, heading levels, TOC location)

 

10. Healthcare Website Design Trend: Personalized Experiences

About 35% of consumers are more likely to make an unplanned purchase if they receive personalized content. Therefore, personalization will be a major web design trend well into 2021.

A very simple example of personalized web design is simply adding other relevant links to each page to lead the customer through the buyer journey.

 

For example, if a patient finished reading a guide to rhinoplasty, they might also be interested in a page with before and after photos.

You can also do more advanced personalizations, such as showing dynamic content based on what the user searched. For example, if the person searched for “kids cancer treatment,” you can have the header image change from an adult to a child and change the messaging.

How to Incorporate Personalized Experiences

The best way to incorporate personalization is by using a plugin called If-So, which offers a variety of different features.

One of its most popular features among marketers is its ability to detect the website visitor’s city and automatically incorporate the city name into the copy on your website.

In addition, it can also segment users. For example, you can show a “start a free trial” CTA to users that have never visited your website and a “20% Discount” CTA to users that have landed on your website. This app can also serve dynamic content based on the visitor’s Google search query.

11. Healthcare Website Design Trend: Embedded Videos

About 72% of consumers said they would prefer to watch a video than read text to learn about a product or service, so it’s no surprise that embedded videos will be a website design trend for 2021.

Videos are wonderful tools to teach patients about specific services (like a procedure), though they can also be used on the homepage to engage the visitor immediately.

Englewood Healthcare Center has an excellent example of an embedded video for the homepage.

As you create these videos, be sure they don’t slow down your website’s page speed. Therefore, ensure your video is HTML5 compatible before you upload it and consider using a compressor plugin. You can learn more about how to do that in this guide.

When you upload your video, have it set to play automatically, though make the user click for sound. This will increase engagement, though it won’t annoy your users.

How to Incorporate Embedded Videos

As most people now work remotely, creating a massive video production likely isn’t an option. However, you can use a simple application like QuickTime to create a screen recording. Just open QuickTime and go to:

File > New Movie Recording > Record

When you’re done recording, just hit stop and save it to your computer.

For editing, you can use software like iMovie, which is free on a mac. Typito is another great video editor that also has a free plan and can be used on any computer.

12. Healthcare Website Design Trend: Captivating Questionnaires

The final healthcare website design trend for 2021 is creating captivating questionnaires like quizzes.

Rather than making customers search your website, serve the information they want directly to them.

For example, depending on your patient’s quiz answers, you can automatically route them to relevant content. In addition, studies show that quizzes are very engaging as up to 96% of people that start a quiz finish it.

Helix Sleep has a great example of how a web designer can funnel people into an interactive quiz to increase engagement.

 

How To Incorporate Captivating Questionnaires

Creating questionnaires or quizzes is very easy (and cheap) with tools like TypeformQzzrQuiz-Maker and more. Each quiz comes with an embed code that you can easily give to a developer to add to a blog post or main page.

You can create multiple-choice, free response, and other quizzes to engage patients.

Here’s an example of a Typeform MedTech quiz.

 

Final Thoughts

Patient’s expectations of digital experiences have risen over the past several years, and the website design trends for 2021 reflect this pattern. In addition, with so many easy-to-use design tools available, your competitors will continue to refine their design.

Therefore, if you want a professional, sleek website that delivers an amazing user experience and exists on a different level from the competition, contact us today for a free consultation.

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