Background
Global behavioral health and wellness solutions company, Vitality, was looking for a new website design implemented to reach their changing audience. With a platform that emphasizes wellness and engagement, Vitality guides and rewards people to make healthy choices and achieve specific goals.
Vitality focuses on all aspects of wellness: physical as well as mental, nutritional and financial, and it allows a host of integrations with devices, biometrics, point solutions, and rewards partners with fully customizable experiences for any company’s needs.
Vitality sought a partner that could redesign and develop their website and elevate their brand. With the website, they primarily wanted to guide users through the funnel, with a strategic journey that showcased the valuable content Vitality has created (and continues to create). With this new direction on the horizon, the previous site didn’t align and didn’t offer streamlined content updates for their team.
Approach
Solid Digital was a known quantity, having partnered with one of Vitality’s directors on a previous web design project. Vitality sought a site with an improved look and feel, and wanted to cater more towards their top audiences, and they reached out to Solid Digital for help.
After a learning and discovery meeting, Solid’s team started the approach with specific goals:
- Improve the user experience
- Increase engagement and improve content visibility
- Improve accessibility features—both with mobile use and ADA compliance
- Streamline updates to the site
Solid Digital took Vitality’s team through a series of branding exercises, while keeping an eye on their ultimate goals.
Process
For improved UX, Solid created a customer journey session, to help Vitality align their website with their target audience, keeping a lead-gen focus. They zeroed in on how things are structured around the audience and how to best show their product offering. Solid asked Vitality’s team: What are each of your audience’s biggest concerns? What triggers their search for a solution? Their answers informed the site map structure for a very specific audience with very particular triggers.
To increase engagement and improve content visibility, Solid Digital worked to keep much of Vitality’s well-written content, choosing to place the blog posts throughout main pages that related to the resource. They also added a Resources tab in the nav to allow easy access to whichever topics the user needed most. The brand personality slider exercise helped dial in what kind of brand Vitality really wanted to be: bright, friendly, fun, and approachable. While working toward the new website, they also aimed to show off a modern edge with fresh design.
For better accessibility, Solid’s team used a plugin and an accessibility auditing program called Accessibe. They kept the contrast ratio in mind, and allowed tab navigation and tailored experience for screen readers. With Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Solid Digital aims to keep at least an AA scoring with any website they create—Vitality’s was no different.
The old site lacked a page builder and updates were difficult, so Solid’s development team updated the structure of the site using WordPress + Elementor, ensuring different parts were “speaking” to each other. Using WordPress and Elementor made it easier to promote blogs to users by showing carousels of specific categorical types of blog posts throughout, prompting the user to continue browsing and reading the content. With plenty of branding shifts occurring and impending with their global marketing team, the North American team needed the new site to easily incorporate new colors, shapes, and icons. The new design, structure and navigation makes room for Vitality’s growth and makes any additions of new branding elements, user profiles, and further details easy to fold in.
For different clientele, needs (and therefore pricing) differs. The home page needed a design that could reach their main audiences, and funnel users from there to learn more about various offerings through Vitality. After some market feedback, it became apparent that customers were being served more information than what was needed. So the teams worked together to move the buckets (Health Plans & Employers) up to the home page and offer a tabbed experience. Users could toggle between either, and the new design allows for more additions as Vitality grows in the future. It was paramount to create details for each audience just under the hero section that would engage them quickly, and guide them to a clear pathway.
In order to drive the point home of healthier lives for employees, Solid Digital created a couple of visual design concepts that included various combinations of colorful, organic, balanced, and clean product imagery. Finally, with bits of logo marks sprinkled throughout, layered elements, and shapes, Solid Digital was able to showcase life (or Vitality, if you will) at its fullest: health plans, health benefits, healthy living, and the positive effects of living a better life. Quotes on the home page add in a touch of relatability and friendliness, as well.
To better manage the content Vitality already worked on, Solid Digital helped condense immediate home page information, and added some content to pages further in the user journey, which served two main purposes: 1) it helped audiences not feel overwhelmed, and 2) it aided SEO with long tail keywords placed in more strategic places beyond the home page. Gated content was created with the installation of a different plugin, giving Vitality the exact result they wanted. Solid Digital was able to provide more custom options in the code for the information gathered in the gated content forms. For the marketing teams, this allowed a streamlined data management method.
Challenges
Despite both teams’ best efforts, there were still some areas that required extra attention. A mid-project branding shift meant a home page update. A mound of valuable content meant insight overwhelm (blogs, resources, events)—so Solid Digital created a sorting system with topic tags and a user search capability to make it all less confusing and overwhelming (which boosted SEO and marketing efforts, too). The existing Customer Relations Software (CRS) didn’t play nicely with the new site; Solid’s developers worked at it until it reacted predictably and worked with the data they were trying to funnel.
Results
Hallmarks of the process included ongoing communication and big collaboration, with teams splitting up the work when branding shifts were handed down from HQ. Throughout the process, the teams also worked together to keep accessibility a priority. With plenty of openness and weekly check-ins, the final product was able to fully capture Vitality’s unique mission of making people healthier—and the architecture of the site was well-oriented around their audiences and their corresponding marketing strategies. Though the branding and audience of Vitality sometimes took on a life of its own, ebbing and flowing, they can now transition and grow as needed. Ultimately, Vitality was excited to have a new site, with good reason: it was finally Vitality’s turn to enjoy rewards after plenty of hard work.
