Healthline: Topic Center Redesign

In 2012 healthline.com went through a major redesign. Here is what triggered it:

1. The overall experience of the site was outdated, the site looked like a depressing waiting room – Not very engaging for readers looking for health information. Here is what the site looked like back then.
2. Back in 2011, Google introduce a set of changes to their search algorithims known as Panda,  which meant to filter out sites with poor quality content/user experience from top search results. At this time healthline.com had a lot duplicated content and most of this content was licensed from A.D.A.M.

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For improving Healthline UX, we needed to re-think what we called topic centers, which in essences are sub categories covering a specific health conditions. For instance, we have a topic center for Type II Diabetes that house several articles related to this topic, ranging from common diabetes symptoms to lifestyle changes.

For this task, I took the following approach:

1. Research: I wanted to know our audience, lucky Healthline had already commission to The Stainberg Group to do a marketing analysis.  This really allowed find our differentiators in the market place.
2. Information Architecture: Part of this task was to re-organize the site navigation
3. Rapid wireframes and prototyping: We wanted to quickly build a prototype for initial usability testing.
4. Small usability test: Before we went into development, we teated the new nav structure and the layout of the topic center, which included articles with actual content.
5. Visual design: Since we had such a strong foundation from all the previews steps, the visual design phase and approval process went very smoothly.