Maine Hospitals’ Swine Flu notices and Web site usability
Thursday, April 30th, 2009Yesterday, as the first cases of swine flu were reported in Maine, one of our Clients, Parkview Adventist Medical Center, contacted us to put a special notice about the outbreak on their Web site, as the number of phone inquiries started to skyrocket.
We handled it by putting a “pushdown” on their home page, which linked to a page with more information on swine flu in Maine. This is a common Web design technique employed by media sites such as CNN and MaineToday.com, in which you push down the normal content/layout and insert a call out on your breaking news.
Our goals in designing our swine flu notice for Parkview were to make it:
- easily noticeable, without wrecking the layout or conveying an undue sense of alarm
- easily updatable
- accessible to visually challenged site visitors
I decided to take a tour of other hospital Web sites in Maine to see how they were handling things. Here are screenshots, taken at 4pm today, of five Maine hospital home pages:
Parkview Adventist Medical Center
What I found provided what I think are teachable moments on two subjects: Web site usability and content management.
Usability
When people search Web sites for information on “swine flu”, they are scanning for text links that say, um, “swine flu”. That’s the reason we used text in the Parkview notice and made the words “swine flu” the link to the page with additional information. As of this writing, Maine Medical Center and Mercy Hospital use text. At Central Maine Medical Center and Midcoast Hospital, they use graphics containing text.
Text in a graphic is not the same as HTML text. A proven characteristic of human behavior, banner blindness, demonstrates that people see HTML text more quickly than text in graphics. People tend to ignore graphics, in part because they are reading/scanning and in part because graphics are commonly used to display advertisements (that are usually irrelevant to the information they seek).
It’s interesting to note that both CMMC and Midcoast used a picture of someone blowing their nose. While well-intentioned, IMHO this creates mental static because such a picture could mean “common cold”, “runny nose” or even “handkerchief” and not necessarily “swine flu”.
Granted, in this case the difference is subtle, but think about your own user experience on these sites (we’d be interested in your comments).
Takeaway: If you want someone to read something, make it text.
Content Management
The layout of each of the swine flu notices give us clues as to how each hospital manages content.
Maine Medical Center – I’m almost certain they use a dynamic CMS to post News updates to the center column of the home page. I’m guessing they may have wanted to feature a swine flu notice in the Flash “marquee” (“Maine Medical Center: Centered Around You”) – and they may still do this, but the Flash is probably not part of the site’s CMS, is probably not easily updateable (and incidentally would not likely be accessible to the visually challenged).
Mercy Hospital - Again, I’m almost certain they use a CMS to update the “What’s Happening” section in the center column of the home page. I’m also fairly sure this CMS limits how prominently staff can display special notices. “Swine Flu” heading has the same color and visual weight as other sub headings in this section.
Central Maine Medical Center and Midcoast Hospital – both very likely use either a staff Web designer or contractor to create banner graphics as needed.
As we’ve mentioned, for Parkview our staff manually creates HTML pushdowns for special notices like this. At some point – for Parkview and for other Clients – it would be nice to add this feature to our custom CMS, the Pemaquid Content Manager. In the meantime, our manual updates are quick and inexpensive.
Takeaway – Content Management Systems should not impede your ability to make appropriate layout decisions. CMS’s do only what they are designed to do. If they are not designed to effectively communicate things like special notices, make sure you have access to a Web designer who can get the job done (that statement is not a back-handed criticism of the designers at other hospitals).
What do you think?
