Innovations bring a lot of changes to various industries, including healthcare. People want to have a comfortable way to schedule a consultation with a doctor or look through the required information. That’s why every hospital needs to have a website. However, to provide users with great experience, the platform should be intuitive and user-friendly. In this guide, you’ll find out about the latest medical website design trends, MVP features, and tech stack for hospital page development.
Top 5 Trends in Medical Website Design
An unclear and crowded website can distract users from their goals. These days, clients want to look through the demanded information fast, so your platform has to be straightforward.Web design trends change fast, so it’s challenging to follow all of them. Below you can find five main trends for 2020.
- Responsive web design. A user-friendly website means a responsible one. Responsive web design stands for the design that follows various screen sizes. As a result, it’s easy to interact with the platform on the smartphone or tablet. People tend to do a lot of tasks on the go, so responsive web design is a must.
- Flat design. It means simple and minimalistic elements for the design. Such a design is quite laconic but contrast. So, users can focus on the page content without distractions. Flat design has a vital benefit. It requires less time for loading due to simpler design elements.
- Micro animations. They are small animated parts of the user interface. The primary goal of micro animations is to draw users’ attention to the required data or feature. Animations shouldn’t overload the page, but make the navigation easier.
- Hamburger menu. The hamburger menu means a button in the top corner. If the user clicks on it, there is a full menu or navigation bar. This trend is quite promising since it allows saving space. Also, the hamburger menu is perfect for mobile devices with small screens.
- Bright colors. The last trend is choosing vivid and deep colors for medical website design. It’s trendy to choose some colors to represent the brand. One more point to consider is the meaning of the colors. For example, orange means optimism, while blue stands for reliability.
There are top five medical web design trends that you can follow during web development. You’d better consider the design requirements before starting the website building. For example, you can choose only two trends to follow. The solution always depends on your business goals and expectations.
Essential Features for Medical Website
Developing a medical website, you need to consider the features. There are two types – basic and advanced. Basic functionality stands for essential features for your system to work properly. As for advanced or complicated features, they tend to make a website more user-friendly and comfortable.Let’s discuss some MVP features in detail.
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- Contact data. The users need to find hospital location and contact information easily. Also, if there are several hospitals, it’s possible to add an opportunity to select the nearest one. It’s better to place contact information (e.g. phone number) on the home page and implement a click-to-call button.
- Key services. Information about the primary services of your hospital should be visible for visitors. For example, the developers and designers can place the list of main services at the homepage with an ability to click for more details.
- Appointments. Let users book a consultation form a website. You can offer a chance to select the date, time, and specialist. Additionally, clients need to fill the data like name, age, phone number, and so on.
- Search. To provide users with more data about your hospital and services, you need to offer a flexible searching system. There can be various filters to let patients sort the results depending on their needs.
As for advanced features, you can find some ideas below:
- Chatbots
- Payments
- Online consultation
- Feedback
As you can see, there are a lot of opportunities to improve your hospital website. It’s better to start creating an MVP version and then add more complicated features.
Tech Stack to Build a Medical Website
To create a successful medical website, you need to consider a tech stack beforehand. The platform should be flexible and scalable. Additionally, you need to make sure that your system follows such regulations as HIPAA and HITECH that tend to protect the patients’ personal information.
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act
This act protects all kinds of information that can identify the person. To name some points, there are names, phone numbers, emails, social security numbers, and so on.HIPAA requires physical, technical, and administrative safeguards. It’s better to integrate data back-up, encryption software to comply with HIPAA.
Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act
HITECH tends to expand HIPAA regulations. For example, this act provides access to Protected Health Information online. It means that patients can look through their data. Additionally, the hospitals have to inform the users in case of any data violations.
Tech Stack
Medical web design and development requires time and preparation. In addition to HIPAA and HITECH, you need to consider the technologies to create a scalable solution. You need to hire a team of experienced and qualified developers. For example, it’s possible to cooperate with a healthcare software development company to comply with the regulations and develop a scalable medical website.There are two parts of web development – front-end and back-end. There are various technologies to make back-end. For example, different programming languages can be used for medical web development, e.g. Ruby, JavaScript, PHP. Also, it’s required to integrate frameworks, databases, and so on. As for front-end development, it also needs a set of various libraries, programming languages, and markup (e.g. React.js, GraphQL, HTML5, JavaScript). Also, there are management tools like Jira or Trello. The final tech stack always depends on your project requirements and business goals. It’s better to consult with software developers while choosing the technologies. Medical web development can be quite complicated due to regulations to comply with. Also, it’s necessary to study the target audience and their needs. Of course, to gain more loyal users, you need to follow the latest design trends.