8 March 2019

A Proposal to Redesign the

Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology

Website

And nothing gets us more excited than designing amazing experiences for clients who share our passion for science and technology–clients such as the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, Bayer, Graybar, The Climate Corporation, T-REX, and, hopefully, the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology.

See, we have a lot of experience making complicated topics simpler to understand and unwieldy resources easier to use. It’s one reason we think you should select us to reimagine the MIR website.

Here are a few more:

We work to properly diagnose a problem before we start working on the solution.
We know beautiful design and moving brand experiences are equal parts big picture and meticulous attention to every executional detail. So we approach our clients’ challenges with a blend of creative strategy and compulsive perfectionism.
We believe in empirical data, testing and experimentation. We constantly measure our results, refine our solutions and build on what we’ve learned.

Our Perspective

Institutions like MIR offer a host of benefits to patients and academics alike. For patients, access to the latest research, breakthrough treatments, state-of-the art technologies, experimental procedures and specialty expertise can mean better diagnoses and better outcomes. And for students, faculty and researchers, the hands-on experience and real-world applications mean a more well-rounded education, more accurate results and a better connection between bench and bedside.

With so many amazing stories unfolding at MIR every day, you’re already doing the hard work of drawing people in. We just need to make it easier for them.

The current website has become a labyrinth, with scores of standalone pages and no clear path for exploration. The central purpose of this redesign should be connecting all your audiences to the information they need faster and more intuitively.

MIR is a top-tier destination for researchers, students and patients alike. And they — and you — deserve a website experience to match.

Our Approach

We’re particularly good at transforming the technical, scholarly and scientific into experiences that engage, educate and inspire.

And we’ve built big, complicated (and award-winning) websites around big, complicated topics. Our success at distilling vast amounts information into a form that’s easy for audiences to understand and apply boils down to, well, boiling it down.

As we worked to map out who visits mir.wustl.edu and why, we found that everything you do falls within two essential categories:

These twin missions deeply affect and influence each other, and they provide the basis for every recommendation that follows — from site design to content strategy. As in life, the digital experience of MIR should consistently elevate and integrate these two callings.

Advancing Radiology

Research

Education

Improving Patient Lives

Healthcare Consumers

Referring Physicians

Pretty, Quick

The best digital content and web experiences have something in common: They’re beautiful.

And it’s not just because of the emotional impact aesthetics have on a user (we’ll get to that), but because a website is the single most accessible articulation of a brand. And first impressions are critical, because we know that visitors make brand judgements within seconds.

Design is the first thing users evaluate, because we are all visual learners. People process images 60,000 times faster than text, and 90-percent of what’s transmitted to the human brain is visual.

Getting Emotional

We’re not only driven by aesthetics. There’s also that darned amygdala.

As one of the most primitive areas in our human brains, we might assume that its raw emotions and knee-jerk instincts are easily overlooked, or at least overcome. But as it turns out, our emotions are critical to higher-order decision making.

00:07

“Without emotion, we are biologically incapable of making decisions. Logic is often the last step in the process. The conscious intellectual brain steps in to produce a rational backstory to justify impulses generated in the murky corners of the unconscious mind.”

Janet Crawford

Master Practitioner Certification in Neuro-linguistic Programming

Janet Crawford sits at the intersection of neuroscience and business, and she’s not alone in her perspective.

Visitors to the MIR website may come to it at emotional time. Whether they're patients looking for answers or prospective students at a pivotal moment in their academic careers, you need to connect with them emotionally and communicate the MIR advantage with empathy.

The Best User Experience is a Useful Experience

Beautiful design isn’t worth much if it’s not also useful. Put simply, UX refers to the practice of simplifying complexity.

Users today, especially digital natives, want to be delivered directly to the content they need. And they want to be delighted in the process. With context for why users come to a site and what they hope to accomplish there, we can provide better access and a more enjoyable interaction from start to finish.

What does date night have to do with best-in-class UX?

Let’s say we’re out to dinner. We have two different options: a quaint bistro and a Tex-Mex joint where you can order Combo #59. Putting food quality aside for a moment, which menu offers a better user experience?

(caveat: let’s assume both restaurants make an equally impressive margarita and that, for once, is not a factor)

Decisions, Decisions...

We’re tempted to give users (or diners) all the options. Every possible way in which we can prepare beans, cheese, protein and rice, in the case of our Tex-Mex example. Choice is good, right?

Here's the problem. Too many choices create fatigue and perhaps even a negative experience.

NN/g, the self-proclaimed (and oft-credited) World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience, point out another peril of too many options in this article. Once a decision has finally, exhaustively, been made we’re left with a nagging feeling that [we] missed something important.

Simplicity Always Wins

The better dining experience is the bistro that delivers a simple, easy-to-navigate menu that anticipates the flavors for which guests are looking.

This is true universally. The types of relevant content vary by audience. The precise image of beauty varies depending on who you’re targeting. But according to a joint study by Harvard, the University of Maryland and the University of Colorado, one thing is true for all of us: the more visually complex a website is, the lower its visual appeal.

We’ll work with stakeholders to define our users’ goals and develop a site structure that guides them to the primary content types they’ll be looking for, as quickly and intuitively as possible.

Many audiences, one site

Physicians, patients, educators, students, researchers, fellows, families.

How can we create a simple and straightforward user experience when we have so many audiences? To fully answer that question, we need to do the research, with you, into your audiences' behaviors and analytics. We can’t guess.

We can’t guess. We aren’t your user. And you aren’t, either.

But to partially answer the question, there are two broad methods.

1 Design for Intent

Instead of structuring navigation and site architecture around who the audience is, design it based on the intent of what they’re hoping to experience. This might manifest like this:

One experience designed for those who believe they can contribute to significant advancements through research and education.

And another designed for those who want to know how MIR can improve or save patient lives.

2 Customization

With a flexible, modular design approach backed by a robust content strategy, you can better anticipate users’ needs and deliver the information they need when they need it. You can also adapt different pages for different needs and objectives, making it more enticing for tangential sites like the Optical Radiology Lab to rejoin mir.wustl.edu.

However we proceed, we’ll continue to test, learn and optimize as we go. Like medicine, effective web design and UX requires constant curiosity and ongoing data collection. But our fundamental UX design philosophy has always proven to be true:

Design, simply. Give users what they need, when they need it, and not a moment sooner.

While not a requirement of this RFP, we couldn’t help but imagine what a simplified homepage might look like.

The left-hand module appeals to patients with lifestyle imagery that depicts positive outcomes instead of sterile clinical environments. Softer language in the dynamic form field shows empathy and adapts with response types. On the right-hand side, a scrolling column spotlights life in St. Louis, upcoming events, recent research news, and more.

Let’s Talk Details

We’ve covered our philosophy. Onto the nitty gritty.

Responsive Design

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Responsive design is responsible design. We approach all web projects with this in mind. The user must have a superior brand experience. That means creating a site that responds to every device on which it’s displayed, with special attention given to a dominant (and growing) mobile audience.
Accessibility

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Paradowski has demonstrable experience working with ADA compliance. Please refer to our Monsanto.com Case Study for a visual example of an application of ADA compliance.

We enact several accessibility guidelines to ensure all users have the best site experience possible regardless of limitations or disabilities. These include:
- Designing every page to be easy to read and consume
- Using color contrast between text and backgrounds
- Establishing a logical focus/order for content without relying on color as the only visual cue
- Supporting easy keyboard navigation with page flow, focus indicators, and providing landmarks
Measurement

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Measurable behavior and actionable insights. A key piece of the site redesign is laying the groundwork for capturing user behavior in meaningful ways. We’ll partner with your in-house team to develop a strategic approach that cuts through the noise of data collection and allows you to focus on identifying trends that lead to a better experience and more time on site. This approach can be adjusted to scale with the scope as new pages are added or existing pages are brought into the ecosystem, as well as existing audience research and legacy data from your social media channels and websites.
Design Language

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Here’s a note about style and the visual language. As the most accessible, and often the most robust representation of your brand, a website should also be a shining example of the brand standards. Throughout the design process, however, we will make recommendations for web-specific fonts, composition, illustration or animation styles, video guidelines and color selections. As part of the deliverable, a working mir.wustl.edu style guide will provide parameters against which other content editors and contributors can execute.

Governance & Content Strategy

Now for the hard part. How will we ensure that the beautiful, intuitive experience outlined above stays that way, even after multiple contributors get access and new content gets added? We’re glad you asked.

Governance, or Asking for Permissions

You’ve made the investment to reimagine your website. In theory, it’s perfect. Now you have to put it into practice. There are three key components to maintaining the integrity of the experience when you do:

1 Create a graduated scale of access.

We’ll work with your team to identify each level of contributor and develop your CMS to allow for customized user roles, permissions and content workflow— all while keeping master control with the Marketing Team.

2 Give good direction.

Along with the design and development of the site, we’ll create a suite of documents to help maintain it. This will include a style guide, notes on typography and color, best practices for file size and resolution, and tips for creating engaging content that’s cross-referenced throughout the ecosystem with deep links, proper taxonomy and tagging.

3 Involve stakeholders at the start.

Educating internal teams about what motivated the redesign and how they’ll benefit ensures that their needs are met and they have the same utility and ease of use as before.

Content Strategy

When it comes to creating content, you’re lucky. Thanks to breakthrough research and life-changing treatments, meaningful stories are already happening at MIR every day. The trick is capturing and sharing them with the right audiences to the right end.

Leveraging the Entire Ecosystem

While your website is your calling card, it doesn't exist in a vacuum. mir.wustl.edu is just one of many ways your audiences will interact with your brand online and “in the real world."

Understanding the role of your website within the larger digital landscape is a crucial step to effectively showing current and prospective patients the groundbreaking work the academic side of MIR is doing, while also showing students, faculty and researchers how their work directly touches patients’ lives.

Channel

Content Strategy

Conversion

prospective patient arrives via Facebook post

spends 60 seconds reading recent news on research breakthroughs

requests an appointment for a second opinion

prospective resident arrives from organic search

explores rich media content about life in StL

Applies for residency

Alum arrives via e-newsletter

reads long-form patient story spotlight

inspired to donate

Beyond the emotional, brand-building benefits of storytelling, there’s another advantage to making content that elevates and integrates your twin missions.

Assets and copy from one content piece can inform and extend to:

Organic Social Posts
Paid Social
Targeting key donor/development demographics
Digital Display and/or Retargeting Ads
Reaching users who visited donation pages without converting
SEO
Expanding our universe of relevant audience intersections
Email Content
Event Collateral
Print Publications

*A note on content migration. Does it spark joy?

If completely sunsetting your current content becomes impossible, we are happy to help curate and then migrate essential existing content. We have helped arm other clients with firm guidelines to ensure that every team conducts their assessment with a consistent lens.

Since implementing this process, we’ve been able to deliver the highest quality product with minimal likelihood for misinterpretation and/or error.

Our Development Process:

The core developer teams produce front- and back-end code.
A peer developer reviews the code for errors following initial front- and back-end development.
Once the peer developer passes their tests, a QA Engineer reviews the new function or feature on multiple browsers and devices to ensure the site renders and functions as expected.
During the final step, the Design team cross-checks the site against their initial layouts to confirm that it meets the client-approved vision.

After the internal process has been completed, the site is opened up to external stakeholder review. At this time, the client is given an opportunity to approve a staged site before anything is pushed to production.

Hosting:

Site to be hosted on WUSTL servers

Preferred Server:

Nginx

Suggested Hosting Environments:

QA, Staging, and Production
Please note, we recommend scheduling backups of hosting environments.

QA Environment:

Paradowski to host on DigitalOcean

SSH Access to Hosting Server:

Possible

Suggested CMS:

Wordpress

Custom Content Component Tool:

Beaver Builder

We understand there is desire to leverage Gutenberg Editor for content management. It is our experience and recommendation that we use a similar system called Beaver Builder.

Like Gutenberg, Beaver Builder is a visual WYSIWYG editor that uses modules to construct pages. Beaver Builder has many user inputs, fields, and modules out of the box that allows developers to create a robust user interface quickly and that accommodates more advanced designs and interactive features. While our agency has had proven success with this system and believe it offers a more established and flexible experience, we would be comfortable working in Gutenberg if it is a firm requirement.

Codebase:

To be held in a git repository stored on BitBucket

Security:

2 Factor Authentication, with a Caching CDN and IP Masking Tool

The Investment

Phase 1: Discovery

$5,000

Phase 2: Definition

$2,500

Phase 3: Diagram

$12,500

Phase 4: Design

$25,000

Phase 5: Development

$50,000

Project Total

$95,000

*This estimate is preliminary based on the information provided so far. It is subject to change once detailed project specifications are agreed upon. Our estimates are built at +/- 10%.

There when you need it

Beyond the initial strategy and redesign, Paradowski is invested in making your website an ongoing success. Additional agency offerings are currently out of scope, but are available for consideration.

Website Maintenance /
$100/month

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A website maintenance SOW can be prepared based on needs following the site launch.
Analytics and Reporting /
$20,000

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Expanded analytics and reporting, including monthly reporting on visitor types, engagement and identified site conversions for one year.
Brand Voice Guidelines /
$5,000

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Provide guidance for future content updates to ensure multiple authors of the site are contributing with a consistent tone and style of voice.
Ongoing Content Strategy and Development /
TBD

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Based on learnings from Phase 1, we can discuss your needs for developing a content strategy plan that works towards business goals in tandem with the new site.
Brand Photoshoot /
$20,000

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Captures the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology space, people, key brand-defining visuals, etc. to provide custom assets to further support stock photography.
Annual Refresh /
TBD

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Based on brand needs, we can provide design and copy support to refresh content each year. We can further discuss and develop a custom plan.

Hi, we're Paradowski

Paradowski is a full-service creative agency based here in St. Louis. If you dropped by the office right now, you’d find roughly 70 writers, art directors, strategists, producers and developers working on all kinds of amazing stuff. We build brands, campaigns and digital experiences for some of the largest companies on the planet, as well as some of the smallest, not-for-profit organizations. Basically, for the last 42 years we’ve done work we believe in, for clients we believe in. We believe in design for all brandkind.

Your Team

Want to know more?

Great. We built a website—we mean, an experience—where you can find out more about the agency, our work and all the people who make it.

Paradowski.com

Don't forget about the case studies!

At Paradowski.com, you’ll inevitably find yourself reading about how many chicken wings Gus, our President, can eat during lunch. Or marveling at Brad’s hairstyles in the 90s. It happens.

But don’t miss the case studies. These efforts, in particular, are relevant examples of the kind of work we’d love to have to the opportunity to create for the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology.

Happy Clients

Kedra Tolson

Executive Director, Marketing and Communications at St. Louis Community College, may be reached at ktolson@stlcc.edu

Patricia Hagan, PhD

President/Executive Director at the Technology Entrepreneur Center/T-REX, may be reached at patricia@downtowntrex.org

Jessica Simmons

Director, Brand Marketing at Bayer (formerly Monsanto), may be reached at jessica.simmons@bayer.com

John Robinson

Vice President, Membership and Communications, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, may be reached at jrobinson@beef.org

Dana Turkovic

Curator at Laumeier Sculpture Park, may be reached at dturkovic@laumeier.org

Chris Peimann

Director of Marketing and Publicity at Sheldon Concert Hall and Art Galleries, may be reached at cpeimann@thesheldon.org

A Proposal to Redesign the

Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology

Website

An Inside Look

Here are a few more:

Our Perspective

MIR is a top-tier destination for researchers, students and patients alike. And they — and you — deserve a website experience to match.

Our Approach

As we worked to map out who visits mir.wustl.edu and why, we found that everything you do falls within two essential categories:

Advancing Radiology

Research

Education

Improving Patient Lives

Healthcare Consumers

Referring Physicians

Design & UX

Pretty, Quick

Getting Emotional

Janet Crawford

The Best User Experience is a Useful Experience

What does date night have to do with best-in-class UX?

Decisions, Decisions...

Here's the problem. Too many choices create fatigue and perhaps even a negative experience.

Simplicity Always Wins

The more visually complex a website is, the lower its visual appeal.

Many audiences, one site

We can’t guess. We aren’t your user. And you aren’t, either.

1 Design for Intent

One experience designed for those who believe they can contribute to significant advancements through research and education.

And another designed for those who want to know how MIR can improve or save patient lives.

2 Customization

Design, simply. Give users what they need, when they need it, and not a moment sooner.

Let’s Talk Details

We’ve covered our philosophy. Onto the nitty gritty.

Responsive Design

Accessibility

Measurement

Design Language

Governance & Content Strategy

Governance, or Asking for Permissions

1

Create a graduated scale of access.

2

Give good direction.

3

Involve stakeholders at the start.

Content Strategy

Leveraging the Entire Ecosystem

Channel

Content Strategy

Conversion

prospective patient arrives via Facebook post

spends 60 seconds reading recent news on research breakthroughs

requests an appointment for a second opinion

prospective resident arrives from organic search

explores rich media content about life in StL

Applies for residency

Alum arrives via e-newsletter

reads long-form patient story spotlight

inspired to donate

Technical Requirements

Our Development Process:

Hosting:

Preferred Server:

Suggested Hosting Environments:

QA Environment:

SSH Access to Hosting Server:

Suggested CMS:

Custom Content Component Tool:

Codebase:

Security:

Time & Budget

The Investment

There when you need it

Website Maintenance / $100/month

Analytics and Reporting / $20,000

Brand Voice Guidelines / $5,000

Ongoing Content Strategy and Development / TBD

Brand Photoshoot / $20,000

Annual Refresh / TBD

Website Maintenance /
$100/month

Analytics and Reporting /
$20,000

Brand Voice Guidelines /
$5,000

Ongoing Content Strategy and Development /
TBD

Brand Photoshoot /
$20,000

Annual Refresh /
TBD