Hebrew SeniorLife, a nonprofit senior services provider based in Boston, needed a new website. The old one was not generating enough interest from potential residents. Rather than dive straight into laying code for a new one, they took a step back to develop clear user personas and conduct consumer research. Their effort and persistence paid off. Their new site is a big step forward and is achieving all the goals they established for it.
Swaay.Health spoke with Terri Robinson, Senior Director of Communications and Content at Hebrew SeniorLife to learn more about their website journey and why it was so successful. We caught up with her at the 2023 New England Society for Healthcare Communications (NESHCo) Conference.
Old Website Needed an Update
There were two main drivers for HSL to build a brand-new website:
- Aging technology. HSL’s original website was built on a proprietary content management system that locked them into that one vendor’s system. It did not have the flexibility they needed to add new features and functions.
- User Experience. The original website was not portraying HSL the way their staff and residents saw themselves. As a result it was not driving as many leads as it should have been.
The HSL team decided to move adopt the Drupal content management system and build a new site from the ground up. Rather than dive right into designing the site, the Robinson and the HSL team smartly took a step back to document their user personas.
User Personas Set the Stage
“We felt it was important to invest in this persona research,” said Robinson. “We knew it would help make the results of our project so much better. Plus, we knew we could take the learnings and apply it to projects beyond the website.”
HSL partners with OHO Interactive, a digital marketing agency specializing in user research, CMS development, content strategy and search engine optimization. Together they conducted many interviews and surveys with users where they asked questions like:
- How do they make senior living and healthcare decisions?
- What pain points have they experienced when looking into senior living options?
- Where are they in their life journey when they started looking at senior living?
The research and the data helped HSL identify the specific personas (characteristics, motivations, needs, etc) of their website visitors. This helped guide the design of the new site.
Thoughtful Photography
One interesting aspect of their research was related to photography. The HSL and OHO Interactive team spent time gauging the reaction people had to various types of pictures – seniors smiling, working, eating, walking, gardening, facility shots, inspirational landscapes, family visits, etc. What they found was insightful.
“It turns out people want photography that elicits positive emotion,” shared Robinson. “If you are a person considering a senior living community, when you see people who are active, who are smiling, who are engaged in their surroundings, that makes you think – ‘that is what I want my life to be as part of this community’. For the adult child who is looking for services for their parent, they don’t want to think of their parent as frail and getting older, even though that might be the reality. They want their parent to be in a place where they can be active and engaging with peers.”
In contrast, there were several pictures on their former HSL site that elicited negative emotions. One photograph, for example, showed an elderly person sitting in a comfy couch staring out a window that had a view of a beautifully landscaped garden. Standing next to the person was a friendly, smiling caregiver.
At first glance this photo seemed innocuous, even positive. However, the research found that elderly users felt that the person in the photo was simply waiting for death and that the caregiver was there to offer companionship at the end of their journey. That was certainly not the message HSL wanted to convey.
Persistence Pays Off
Robinson presented HSL’s website journey at the 2023 New England Society for Healthcare Communications (NESHCo) Conference. In that presentation she spoke about the persistence needed to push the website project forward.
“For everyone outside of the marketing team, website projects should not require more than a week to finish,” Robinson joked. “But those of us doing the work know the amount of effort that it really takes. As our project moved ahead, we had to be persistent in sticking to our process. We knew that if we followed our plan, didn’t cut corners, and took our time we would end up with a website that would achieve our goals. That is what we did and that was the result we achieved together.”
Watch our interview with Terri Robinson to learn:
- Why HSL decided to forgo stock photography in favor of something more unique for their new site
- How looking back it was clear their old site was designed around the organization rather than their users and potential residents
- What recommendations Robinson has for anyone who may be starting their own website redesign
Learn more about Hebrew SeniorLife at https://www.hebrewseniorlife.org/
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