Every day at work, Huntercombe people do great work helping people lead better, more fulfilling lives, and we felt our former website didn’t capture that. We asked ZPB Associates to handle the project.
08 March 2017

Welcome to the brand new Huntercombe website!

Welcome to the brand new Huntercombe website!

Why build a new website?

Every day at work, Huntercombe people do great work helping people lead better, more fulfilling lives, and we felt our former website didn’t capture that. We asked ZPB Associates to handle the project.

What users wanted

But what should the new website do differently? To understand what website users wanted, we brought together people from different services with different perspectives for a user experience workshop with user experience architect Andy Parker. Our key findings were:

  • Users wanted to know what happens at a hospital or centre and what it looked like
  • Some users will be using the website at a stressful and anxious moment in their lives
  • We found more commonality than you might have thought – whether a patient, parent, partner or carer, the thoughts, questions and feelings were shared

The overall objective was that the website had to reassure users that Huntercombe is the best place for them, feel less scared and improve how users navigate to hospital pages. Designer Paul Davison rose to the challenge. He designed the site to be friendly and non-corporate-looking.

“Hi there! I’m a service user.” Said nobody in the world. Ever.

We looked at the words we were using to describe ourselves and thought about language from a new patient’s perspective. We sought advice from copywriter Vincent Graff who told us to ditch the jargon and write the way we speak and convinced us life was better without waffle!

A picture tells a thousand words

The photographs on this site are of real Huntercombe people doing what they do – captured by photographer Mischa Haller at photoshoots in Maidenhead, Ashley House and Moorpark Place.

Lights, camera, action!

Film director Tom Richardson from Trilogy Media and his crew drove a minbus to Scotland to film the engaging Alastair and his support worker Caron, as well as former Maidenhead patient Christine and the teams at Ashley House and Frenchay with many more amazing and inspirational people.

And finally, we tested the site with teenagers, patients, families and staff to see how user-friendly the site was for doing specific things. It’s always really valuable to see people using a new website and the findings led to us making some changes to improve the usability further. The people we asked to test the site rated the new tone of voice highly and found it easy to read.

We’d like to say a big thanks to all those who attended the workshop, who tested the site for us, and everyone involved in the photography and filming – we hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.

We would love to know what you think about the site and let us know if there is anything you would like to see on the site in the future.