What patient recruitment websites can learn from airport design

Earlier this week, I found myself at two airports I’d never visited before. Despite this, I was able to find my way around them with ease. Why?

Because they’d been created by design teams who’d built logical pathways signposted with easy-to-understand information.

What’s this got to do with web-based patient recruitment? Quite a lot, actually. After all, like an airport, your patient recruitment website will only work if it’s easy to use. How do you achieve this?

The trick is to make every page self-evident to the user. In other words, just by glancing at it, an average person should know instantly what it is. And how to use it.

Needless to say, the more usable your website, the more likely patients are to stay on it and consume information about your trial. Which means they’re also more likely to enquire about trial participation.

To create an easy-to-use patient recruitment website, you need to stick to several rules. Chief amongst these are the following:

Make the important stuff obvious
When a patient looks at a page, they should be able to tell instantly which things are most important.

Make it clear where the patient is on your website
People don’t always arrive via your homepage. Therefore, you need to make it obvious to them where they are on your site. For example, by offering a crumb-trial.

Tell the user where they should begin
Just like at an airport, you need to provide visual clues to help a patient know where to start their journey through your site. For example, by signposting the videos or text you want them to see first. And the enquiry form you want them to complete afterwards.

Make it easy for people to find what they want
Make it obvious to a patient where they should go to find something. Like a contact number. Or information about a similar clinical trial.

Minimize visual clutter
The less visual information used when presenting data, the easier something is to understand. That’s why airport signage looks so simple. By keeping your page layouts nice and clean, you’ll make it easier for people to consume information about your study – and get interested in joining it.

Use simple naming conventions
Always use words that lay people understand. That includes on your navigation items. And everything else on the site – like headlines.

Make it clear what is & isn’t clickable
Use a common website design device to show which text contains a link. For example, by making your text links blue.

Once you’ve completed your website design, you need to test it with users. The purpose of these tests is to see whether people can glide through your site as smoothly as you’d hoped.

Next, use the learnings from user testing to tweak your site design. Once you’ve done this, user test again.

What examples do you have of good usability?