Breaking all the rules – website redesign wins 15 awards

I like rules. They beckon success, do this and get that. The thing is the more I learn about marketing, about business I learn there’s only one rule to my surprise: break all the rules. Conventional is out, today’s competitive market rewards rule breakers. We did just that with a corporate website, www.Healthways.com, where typically the collective rules of the organization meld into a giant hairball mess. The user long forgotten and a site pleasing only to the corporate fathers. We took a different approach. On a challenge from our CEO to “make senior leadership uncomfortable” we set out to innovate how we market …and it’s been rewarded! Not by one, or two but three international digital leadership award committees. The redesigned Healthways.com has been granted over fifteen awards in categories such as, B2B Standard of Excellence, Health Care Standard of Excellence, Visual Appeal, Copy and Professional Services. In case you’re thinking, yeah but, let us add that the website was judged in categories with RMHP, American Express, Coca-Cola, Mayo Clinic, Emdeon, Pepsi and AT&T.

How did we do it? The key was excellence in execution on our three main objectives. Here’s how we broke the rules to win awards:

• Strategy before make pretty. Prior to picking a single picture or a drafting one word we defined a clear strategy based on a thorough consensus. Explicit goals, specific intended user actions and measurement metrics were forefront.

• Never mind the competitors. How easy it is to get wrapped up in what the next guy is doing. Instead we made a disciplined pact to not look at competitors. Instead we looked to a broader influence, what are the experiences of consumers today? What is the common expectation of a website experience? How are consumer websites delivering results? Taking careful consideration of the consumer experiences of sites such as nike.com led us to a solution forward design, which simply means we applied b2c practices to a b2b site – after all even our prospects, CEO’s/CFO’s etc. are consumers.

• People not automatons. Content is still king …or queen. Our content queens wrote for people not ambiguous “users.” Have you ever met a “user?” Neither have we, but we do know some humans. The site was written in a consumer voice with clarity and a specific persona in mind. Sometimes less is more, to be concise was the last key while writing. Appropriate brevity is key today to a successful user experience, um I mean personal experience.

Well, I should get back to rethinking the site. But first, how are you taking a different approach?