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The Medico Digital Podcast is your go-to resource for all things healthcare marketing. Hosted by industry experts, we explore the strategies, insights, and innovations shaping the future of healthcare brands. From digital advertising and SEO to patient engagement and brand positioning, we break down what works (and what doesn’t) in an industry where trust, compliance, and competition are everything.
Whether you’re a healthcare marketer, clinic owner, or agency professional, expect candid conversations, actionable advice, and deep dives into the tactics that drive results. Tune in to stay ahead in the fast-evolving world of healthcare marketing.
Louis (00:00.952)
Hello and welcome to another Medico digital podcast. I'm your host Louis and today I'm joined by Alex Wilby, our design leader, design impresario, mercurial talent, the man who, where Jesus turns water into wine, Alex turns, Alex turns requests like make it pop into incredible digital products that are seen and used by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of
patients, healthcare information seekers throughout the UK and beyond. And unfortunately, he's a Leicester City fan. Hi Alex.
Alex (00:37.41)
Hello, too, too kind to me there. I don't think I've deserved that at all. But yeah, I'll take it nonetheless, for sure. Somebody's gotta make me feel good, know, being a Les Citi fan at the moment isn't, so yeah, I'll take your praise instead. But no, thanks for that intro.
Louis (00:45.55)
Okay, cool.
Louis (00:52.192)
Hahaha
Yeah, take it, take away. get it. No, no, no worries. So you might be wondering why you're here. we haven't done a full kind of pre-briefing beforehand. but I thought what I wanted to do, we've been talking a lot about marketing. We've been talking a lot about specifics SEO, Meta add updates and things like that. And a lot of it's very much based around.
performance marketing, getting in front of the right people, getting the right people onto the right platforms. And I think that's a lot of where the discussion in marketing sits, especially with the type of audiences that we're typically speaking to. And I think sometimes unless you're looking at a kind of top tier creative agency or pure out and out creative and design, where you're thinking kind of Mad Men style, off the wall campaigns, sexy award entries, for example, that sometimes design can be a little bit of an unsung hero. And
I wanted to get you on just to drill into that a little bit in terms of your role and your perspective on creative because I mean, I can talk about it all day long, but my sense of design is basically zero. It's not that I'm not creative, but I think I've got like a visual, a mental visual impairment. can't, I can't look at a blueprint of a house and imagine what a house can be like. I can't look at a wall, imagine what it would be like in a different color. And I find it kind of endlessly fascinating for people like yourself that can take
Like I joked about the beginning, but pretty vague. Like, can we do this and then think about how you can turn that into something that's actually real and useful. so yeah.
Alex (02:24.93)
You're doing yourself down mate. I've seen your Google slides presentations and there yeah, something to behold. But yeah, no, I appreciate it. And I think it is a difficult one because it's always and like you say, unless you're like an Apple or Coca Cola or McDonald's and you're one of these really big, pure creative design agencies that people look to.
for something different, for something that's really gonna blow everyone else out of the water and in all industries really. It's difficult for an agency like is that, know, pride ourselves and our foundation on performance marketing and all the juicy stuff in the background that, you know, makes everything work and gets people to where they need to get to. It's really difficult then to come in and sell the value of
Yeah, you've bought all this, all this analytics, all this information about your business, your audience, where we should put these ads, how much we should spend on the advertisements, advertisements that we put out there. And then to say, yeah, but at the end of this, what you need is loads more money being spent on like a really, really nice either campaign to go with the
kind of the work that we do in the background in terms of data and that kind of stuff or a really, really nice, well-functioning great UX website that is going to essentially finish the job of all the hard work that's been done before by the performance and digital marketing side of things.
Louis (04:11.04)
Yeah, I completely get that. But I also think that shouldn't mean that its importance is kind of undervalued, undermined in any way, just because when you break things down, you look at how much can you ask of a client? How much can you ask of their budget? How far can it stretch? What is going to be the most important thing? But I think we see this time and time again. then guess, first thing, a caveat, I'm aware design, I'm aware kind of creative as a broad sense can mean different things to different people.
I think for the sake of simplicity, a lot of the time when I am talking about it, it's just what I typically interact with day to day, which is typically things like websites and landing pages. But even if you just take that relatively narrow view of what we're talking about, we see it time and time again. Like you can have the best, most well-structured, most robust campaigns with huge budgets. So if we're talking about paid media, for example, you can have really great content. you can have really, really great service, great kind of proof of trust.
at a competitive price as well. But sometimes it does just boil down to it. Yeah. But your website looks like shit and we can't do anything about that. But it can't make it work. And people are so used to in other aspects, especially when we're looking at healthcare, they're used to in other aspects of their lives, seeing really slick, really nicely thought out, well-designed UX, everything from kind of Netflix to Apple, to Amazon, whatever it might be. And then they come to healthcare. And I think it's quite hard for people not to take their
day to day judgments of how professional something is, how well working something is, and apply the same kind of lens to an industry that doesn't, hasn't always taken it that seriously in terms of how something is laid out, what the user journey is. Which means you've got a really, really difficult job.
Alex (05:53.898)
Yeah. And, and like you say, you touched on earlier in a kind of facetious way, but you know, the whole make it pop or we just want to, yeah, we just want to innovate or we just want this to look like different from everyone else. And, know, that's really nice, obviously for clients to come in and say that they've got the best intentions in mind. And obviously we love a challenge and to be able to meet their requirements and demands. but like you say, it,
Louis (06:02.314)
Yeah, I think I've said that before.
Alex (06:22.826)
It's funny because in this day and age where like good design, good experience, nice visuals, lovely brand and branding from the companies that you interact with on every single day of your life, whether you're at home, whether you're watching TV, whether you're on the internet, whether you're out and about, etc. It means now people expect it in all areas of their life. And that means
Louis (06:49.848)
Hmm.
Alex (06:51.682)
when they hit a website that is, you know, healthcare website or kind of something or a website where they're like looking at condition that they may have or symptoms, et cetera. I think the general consensus is that all that goes out of the window and doesn't matter when actually it matters the most in those areas because what you don't want to be
What you don't want to deliver to your user when they're searching for health, health care based things is a really bad experience. So they can't, so their attention is drawn away from what it is they're actually looking for and more focused on, my God, like I can't use this website or this looks awful. I don't trust this brand because yeah, it just doesn't, it doesn't sing to me in the way that other brands do.
Louis (07:31.042)
Information,
Louis (07:50.774)
Yeah, it's, I think for all of those reasons, it's talked about in a different frame to, some of the other areas of marketing and areas of getting that information out and getting it trusted. I what I kind of wouldn't mind just taking a couple of minutes to step inside the mind of a, of a designer.
Alex (08:14.892)
Dangerous.
Louis (08:17.71)
Well, like it genuinely is something that I think I just don't really have any concept of like how you go about doing this. And one of the things I wanted to ask is like, if you take a website and we recently did our website, for example, the Medica website, and you, maybe you decide it needs a bit of a refresh. You're feeling, feeling a bit stagnant. Some of the ideas you might've had before you think you're ready to kind of implement, but like, what is the first thing you actually do? And it doesn't have to be our website or any specific website, but like,
you putting pen to paper? Are you meditating? Are you looking for inspiration and looking what other people are doing? How does the process start?
Alex (08:50.398)
Hahaha.
Alex (08:56.45)
think yes great question and yeah I go straight to the meditation room in my house and just draw actually I grab my magic wand and I just give it a flick and then boom everything happens no I just obviously yeah it's great question so I think that where where the principles of like where I I think the principles of what I value from like a design point of view
Louis (09:02.712)
Hahaha
Alex (09:25.154)
truly laid... let me start again.
Alex (09:33.762)
Okay, I think my design principles and what they're built on are design that works, like essentially, and how do you know if something's gonna work unless you know like who you're trying to make it work for and what it needs to do to work for those people. And so I think it's really important this first step is to look at what you've got currently.
Louis (10:00.686)
Mm.
Alex (10:01.676)
put yourself in a user's shoes or, you know, get users in to give you some really kind of really concise and honest feedback about their experience and take that and look at then what you want to achieve or what your goals are for your business or your brand or your product or your service that you're kind of providing through this medium of your website. And yeah, obviously taking into consideration like competitors and what they're doing as well, but I think
people can get too drawn, I think, into looking at what other people are doing in their area or what's our main competitor doing and look like. I think it matters, obviously, but I think to focus on you, what you're trying to achieve in terms of your business and what your users need is absolutely the starting point to any website project.
Louis (10:56.13)
That's really interesting. and I think that was going to be my second question. Again, I'm so naive here that I did actually have in my head that you would just be like, right. I'm going to start putting down designs and kind of think about what I would like. But then my second question was actually going to be that is, are you just blessed with taste that works or like, how do you differentiate what you think looks good and what you would just put down from an aesthetic perspective or that you think works and makes sense in terms of UX? How'd you do that and differentiate from
what the target audience might be interested in. kind of mentioned it there of starting with the building blocks, starting with what are the objectives, what does the audience look like? Because very few brands, especially in the healthcare space, I think have the budget to go out and get focus groups in and start like doing that really robust due diligence at the beginning. So what are you doing there?
Alex (11:39.255)
Yeah.
Alex (11:45.302)
Yeah, I think that's another great question. think like, obviously, it helps to be able to draw on the experience that you've got as an individual as a team as an agency in general. But but also draw from the experience of your client as well, like they know their business the best they know their users the best. So we, I our team like to collaborate massively with our clients in that first instance to just like truly
fully understand what it is that we're, we're dealing with here. And then when you actually have to go away and go, right, okay, I've got all this information now, like, what do I do with it? And where do I start? Then? Yeah, I guess that is where our or individually, you I think that's where you as an individual, or the people that you're working with around you have their own, their own kind of strategies in terms of where they start a lot of people.
draw from reference and look at what's happening at the moment. Look at different sites that appeal to the same kind of audience that you're going after. Look at some of the research that's been done in regards to millennials versus Gen Z, versus different generations and how they interact with certain colors, certain styles, attributes of design when it comes to their digital experiences.
So it's a tough one because it could start from a different place for every different project we work on. But yeah, I think what happens is that clients love to see in our opinion. We obviously value so much the kind of foundational work that we put in, especially when it comes to web design. You're looking at the kind of structure of the website, the navigation, the kind of wireframing of what content looks like and where it goes and how.
Louis (13:27.982)
Yeah.
Alex (13:44.418)
how the user flows through the site if depending on X, Y and Z but ultimately like you say people are attracted to the visual things that they can see and how that comes across so I think once we've got a really core foundation and a strong foundation we love to jump straight into okay let's do some kind of mood boards let's bring in some references let's show you some concepts of what you could do with with your brand specifically
Louis (14:13.6)
That's yeah, thank you. That's really interesting. I think you mentioned it there that the clients like to see. Have you slipped off your wedding ring? Is that what's just happened here? Are you flirting with me?
Alex (14:22.578)
I talking to you, Louis.
Louis (14:28.014)
I can't remember what I was gonna say now. think I was gonna say, yeah, you said, clients love to see. And I think that is true. And I know that from, from being a client myself, I suppose. And like, obviously, they, can talk about all of the conceptual stuff you can do the mood boards, you can do the questionnaires, you can dig deep into what competitors are doing everything you've mentioned. But ultimately, they want to see like, what are you going to produce for us? What's that going to look like? And again,
Alex (14:31.234)
Guys love to see.
Louis (14:57.262)
If I haven't made it clear, I'm not a designer and not being a non-designer. Like the thought of that terrifies me. Like, all right, so now I have to go and put something on down visually and then just put it in front of a client and actually see, do you like that? So it's a, how do you deal with clients? Like, how do you deal with, because it's so subjective as well. Like for me, for most of the stuff that I deal with, like, well, can we get you more ROI?
Alex (15:17.814)
Yeah.
Louis (15:23.47)
Like no one's arguing with that. And no one's gonna say, no, I don't want more revenue. I don't want bigger margins. I don't want more users. But you might put something together that even if you were gonna do a focus group that scores like a hundred percent is the perfect UX. I know it doesn't exist. And the client might just be like, I actually really like pink and you've gone with blue. So what are you doing? So how do you deal with that? And I'm sure it's not quite as like flipping as that, but also
Alex (15:49.132)
No.
Louis (15:49.87)
added to that because I think this is a really interesting part of it. Like how do you deal with multiple clients in one like different stakeholders? Like you have maybe an SEO team that's really worried about the features of the like, the website being able to rank or you have a sales team that just want the call to action massive and in your face or you might have like a brand manager that really worries about the imagery that you're using. You've got to please all these people. How do you even start to do that?
Alex (15:56.748)
Yeah.
Alex (16:14.338)
Yeah, it's tough one. It is real tough and I won't I won't pretend it's not and I won't I think yeah, you've got a thick skin as a designer if you're getting into this game because you know it That's a part of the job that I actually really love in being challenged about like why something looks like it does because I think that Yeah, like you say it's so subjective. Like everyone's got an opinion. I could walk down the street and go. my god, that looks
Louis (16:32.363)
Hmm.
Alex (16:40.162)
that adverts amazing or you know, that brand really speaks to me because of X, Y and Z and another person could be like, Oh God, I hate the color of that car or blah, blah, blah. And it is so subjective. So it's like almost impossible to be able to get everybody on board. And I say everybody because we do deal with clients that have multiple stakeholders because of the kind of the game that we're in. And so yeah, it's really difficult. But I think that's why it's so important.
Louis (17:03.788)
Mm.
Alex (17:08.972)
to have that kind of Y in your back pocket. So I can have our clients come to us and say, like, we really don't like this because of X, Y, and Z. And not that we kind of want to argue too much, but we pride ourselves in like challenging our clients to think differently. And if they come to us with, okay, we don't like this because of X, then I think the way that we work as a team and as an agency means that we've always got
a reasoning behind why we've done something. And I think as long as we can, as long as we take on board what our clients have to say in regards to their preferences from like a color and yeah, that's dumbing it down because a lot of the clients we work with, you know, do have like brand guide, like, yeah, you know, but it is is right because we work with clients that have established brand guidelines and still come to us and say, we actually don't like these colors. And so these are the kind of conversations you have to have.
Louis (17:54.036)
Yeah, yeah, that was a bad example, wasn't it?
Louis (18:02.944)
Yeah.
Alex (18:07.514)
And it is it's a challenge every single day. And it's a really fun one. And don't get me wrong, like can be quite frustrating one as well. But I think like I said, that's why it comes for me anyway, it comes down to the to the why like, as long as we've got an understanding and a reason, like, we've done this because of this, we've done this because we know this, we've done we've done this because overall, we understand that, you know, this, I think that that's a really important factor. I think if you're always going to set yourself up for failure, in my eyes, and I've experienced this
first hand through like being and doing this for over 12, 13 years, you're always going to set yourself up for failure. If you go into something just on a whim based on like what you think is going to look good and what you think is going to work well, because don't get me wrong, like having a good feeling and experience to draw on about those aesthetic things, UX, all the beautiful things that come with web design projects.
Louis (18:52.344)
Mm.
Alex (19:06.006)
Yeah, although having a great good good feeling experience to draw from in that is is fantastic. And if you're a good experience designer, then a lot of times, you know, instinctively, I think you think, okay, I think I know where this needs to go. But there's got to be more to it a bit more depth in terms of understanding exactly like, why is he doing this? I think if you question yourself is questioning yourself, I think is one of the main things you can do. I think if you
If you go in to a project with a kind of one track mind with your blinkers on, you go, right, I know what's going to look great. I know what's going to look fantastic. I'm just gonna put this down on paper, get it on screen, get it in front of the client and don't take a second to either draw on kind of opinions of others. Look at kind of research or anything that goes, look at research or anything that kind of educate you in regards to what you're designing and
critically don't question yourself. Don't take the time to go hold on a second. Like does that actually look good? Is that what I should be doing? Is this layout right for who I'm designing for that? Then you're going to fail like nine times out of 10, maybe even more.
Louis (20:21.464)
So what I'm kind of hearing there is that although it is completely subjective, the process that you go through, sounds like your biggest critic in terms of why you're doing something and what's working well. So if you've gone through the process correctly and not just made assumptions and not just done what I was kind of thinking at the start of the school and just putting down whatever comes to mind when you're staring at a candle for half an hour and then coming out of it with an epiphany.
Alex (20:44.983)
Yeah
Louis (20:46.798)
then you've already got the rationale to back up why you've done certain things. And those are going to be the main questions that you get asked by the client. And if you can back it up, they'll either agree with it or not. But that's the basis for a discussion and where you go from, from where you are, presumably.
Alex (20:58.85)
yeah, and again, like, don't get me wrong, you know, design concepts can dramatically change from where we start in terms of specifically what we're talking about here, like website designs, all the way through to then what actually is kind of agreed and signed off and, then eventually becomes the, the actual delivered product. And we experienced that with the Medico site, you we, you, Ollie, other members, other core members of the team were
involved in that process on a daily basis for a long, long time where we had one idea and we explored it and understand, try to understand why we were doing it like that. And then all of a sudden we move in a completely different direction, that segues into something that looks very different from when you started, but is based on kind of just
It looks very different from where you started, but works in a similar way. It's just, we've, we've thought about it from a kind of different perspective. If that makes sense, hopefully it makes sense.
Louis (22:07.438)
I mean, it does. It definitely makes sense to me because I was in a lot of these conversations and I remember it being incredibly tense and horrible. I came back around. But I think there were just a lot of passionate opinions. Can you see my screen? I pulled up the Medico website. So I thought, as you've just mentioned, it may be worth putting you on the spot and asking you a couple of things. I think the thing we get the most feedback about, which will probably really upset you, is the lovely toggle for Dark Mode.
Alex (22:10.56)
Hahaha
Alex (22:20.171)
Yeah, yeah,
Alex (22:36.802)
That is the first thing I think that anyone who visits our website first of all goes, oh nice, you've got a dark mode. It's like, oh, okay, yeah, that's cool.
Louis (22:37.038)
Louis (22:43.958)
I know.
Yeah, I suppose I don't really, we don't need to go through the website in any kind of detail that the two kind of questions I had, and I don't know if there are ways to use our website, because we can't talk about individual clients on a call like this. But I don't know if like, the questions are kind of interested in are two opposites. One, what are the most important elements?
Alex (23:00.61)
Mm.
Louis (23:11.328)
of a website. And I don't know whether that's like specific things like the navigation or the calls to action or what's above the fold or if it's intangible, like use of white space, like not overcrowding and like the feel of the website. And then on the flip side, like what are the biggest mistakes that people I think make, I'd be kind of interested to know. Hopefully you can't point out too many of them on our website, but if there are like no hold spot but
Alex (23:35.052)
Yeah.
Louis (23:37.698)
Yeah, like what kind of common themes good and bad are there? And can we point to the Medica website to illustrate any of those?
Alex (23:45.218)
Yeah, I think in terms of the most important elements to get right, and again, I'm talking from like a personal perspective, but something we've recognized across like the hundreds and hundreds of web projects that we've done here as well, is that you can get so wrapped up in the choice and style of imagery or the icons or the colors or how big the fonts are or where the court of actions go, et cetera.
But fundamentally the website needs to be easy to use and it needs to like work and so many times and I say easy to use, but it's so broad because easy to use means very different things to very like different people or very different scenarios. But again, that that's a part of that process. That's a part of working through like who do we need to take into consideration?
Louis (24:22.35)
Mm.
Louis (24:31.393)
Yeah.
Alex (24:42.978)
when we're working with this client. And that's why it's so important to take into consideration who this website is for fundamentally. Because if you don't do that, like I went, go back to what I said at the beginning, if you don't know who you're working for, ultimately, you can't then start to understand and question yourself on, okay, does, is this easy for that specific user?
to use? Does this work for that specific user? yeah, so think they're like two massive important elements. Like, does it does it work, first of all? And yeah, is it easy for the user to use?
Louis (25:24.686)
And would those both be in the same ballpark, suppose, is the like it needs to be intuitive, presumably. So if you look at this website, for example, people might appreciate the aesthetics, they might like the colors, they might like some of the parallax stuff we've got going on. That's about the smartest design work and word I know. But, but really, it's like, do they know how to get in touch with us? And is that straightforward?
Alex (25:42.795)
Yeah.
Louis (25:50.872)
think most people would probably expect that to be a contact button, a call to action. think, yeah, I don't want to make any assumptions that are websites easy to use, because I'm not necessarily the target audience. But you'd hope that that is by conforming to design elements that a lot of other people have. You kind of you know where you're at, you don't necessarily want to come in and have something completely off the wall. That doesn't purposefully does something completely different to what everyone else does, because presumably then people come in and should be like, I don't know where I am. I don't know how to.
even if I want to get in touch with them, I've got to go through six different pages to get to like a contact form.
Alex (26:23.554)
And that's it. think what I mean by does it work is again like...
in a certain place, that's totally okay to be like completely different from every other experience of websites within the industry that you're looking in. Like we, as a designer, as a creative, I would like welcome that, right? You want to step outside the box. You want to look and feel completely different. You want to innovate to like the point of no return, but it still needs to work.
Louis (26:44.141)
Yes.
Alex (27:04.318)
right, it still needs to function. Even if it might look completely different, even if it might kind of take, even if the experience might be like a completely new one in regards to how you navigate a website, how you move through a digital space, it still needs to work. And when I say work, I don't mean just like, functionally, but like in the, in the the mind of the user, like, okay, I need to contact this website, like,
where is the contact? It needs to make sense and be easy to use in that respect. Does that make sense?
Louis (27:38.634)
It does make sense. think the way that I personally see that the most with the clients that I work the most closely with, it's not really how you would traditionally or something that you would traditionally attribute to design and creative, but it's maybe more on the kind of the UX side. and going back to all of this being very intertwined and it being a very broad topic anyway, but I think where people make the biggest mistakes are around just that, that user journey to, get in touch. think.
Like a good portion of our clients, their main objective is, is lead generation from healthcare information seekers or patients or whoever it might be. And they know that like that's the first thing they say to you. And then you go on their website and it's like, great. I've just spent five minutes trying to find how to get in touch. And then when you finally do, it takes you through to a completely different domain. And then you've got like three layers of form fields to put in and you've kind of forgotten why you're there. And then you've got.
Like you basically having to justify why you're getting in touch and then you're putting all these, dropdown menus with all these different consultants, maybe that you've got like picked from and, and, and then they w they wonder why their traffic's really high, but their conversion rate is really low. And it's because it just, it just doesn't work. I haven't thought about it ever from the perspective of the user. They've just been like, well, our sales department need X, Y, Z piece of information. And that is their primary objective rather than I'm putting myself in the shoes of my audience and actually thinking through.
what they're doing on a Friday evening when they're on their phone, just trying to get an appointment or something like that.
Alex (29:05.964)
Yeah.
Alex (29:12.214)
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I know our website is obviously on screen now and we wanted to show you something visual in terms of like how, yeah, because a lot of what we were talking about today was getting into the mindset of like, who's going to be using our site and important elements to get right. And what I've spoken about previously may have sounded more technical than from a design point of view in terms of like, does it work? Is it easy to use? But, know, visually that plays such a key
part in does it work? it easy to use? Because yeah, like if I'm an agency, as we are, and we want to make sure that we can show off like the best work that we do to our clients again, because you know, we can talk about what we do all day long, but really it comes down to like, okay, can you deliver what you on what you talk about? So the visual aspects, the visual aspects, and the kind of data driven aspects of the work that we do need to be clear.
Need to be large and in your face on our website I think that we've done a nice job in taking a mixture of the projects that we do from a design point of view from web design, you know through to campaigns some brand work, etc and Show off exactly what you get for your money because that's it. Isn't it? Right? We're service like you pay like an amount of money. What am I what am I gonna get for that money? And I think
Our website does a really nice job at showing people exactly what it is that you can get if you come and partner with us as an agency for your design web.
Louis (30:45.742)
Is that your sales pitch at the end? If you want a piece of Alex, smash that like and subscribe button.
Alex (30:47.106)
No, no, I just I just wanted to make sure I was talking again about the visual side of things as opposed to just like the because like UX is so important. We know it is. And we're like advocates of talking about that, especially to the healthcare sector where we know that it falls down like dramatically. And we've done our own work in in some of the Louis, what's the name of the thing that we just done?
Louis (31:16.366)
Wait,
Alex (31:17.334)
What's the name of the thing that we've just put out in regards to like scoring yet UX?
Louis (31:21.102)
I think we've like a recent client project. I think you just lost your mind. That's okay. Yeah. It's the, there's a healthcare digital index and a pharma digital index.
Alex (31:23.68)
No, you can cut this out by the way, I'm asking you so can continue.
Alex (31:32.138)
Yeah, okay. All right. Rewind. What are talking about? Yeah, we know UX is like so important. And we're massive advocates of like, speaking out about how bad it can be in the in the like, healthcare and pharmaceutical industry. And we've even like done our own work and written about it and posted about it in terms of the kind of UX index and rankings that we put out there for some of the some of the healthcare and pharmaceutical sites that you know, are out there. But
Louis (31:35.212)
hahahaha
Alex (32:01.794)
Yeah, I didn't want it to just be about like the technical side of it. It's really important but visually it needs to needs to work as well and and again, but depending on who you are depending on your brand depending on how you want to be perceived by the audience that are on your site, but again visually you can go anywhere I think where we were we were conscious of going was making sure that we conveyed like who we were
as like people as an agency in terms of our website that we wanted to, you know, we're cool. Why not? might not sound like it or seem like it from from this podcast, but we're like, colorful, energetic, like vibrant people, you know, we, we have fun, we get together, we care about stuff, we've got families, we've got hobbies in the background, I think that needs to come across, like when we're an agency, and what you're buying into is the people within that agency. So yeah, having like an about page that featured some of the
some of the pictures from our get togethers, what we do in our spare time, et cetera, is really important. Obviously the work that we do is so important. So having a good portfolio and, you know, a section of case studies was important as well. Um, and then obviously the, how we convey like what it is that we care about as a company and yeah, what, what drives us, what makes us passionate about working in healthcare industry and, and doing a great job for the clients that we do ultimately is the customer, right?
the client, sorry, the customer, the patient, the user at the end of it. And we look out for them first and foremost, like, yeah, our clients are so important. And what they need from us is a massive priority. But it's their clients, know, their patients that we need to think about the most in terms of like web design and all the work that we do for them.
Louis (33:32.142)
Mm.
Louis (33:51.618)
Yeah, I love that. And I think any of the other questions I was going to ask feel pretty trivial after that. I think that might be a nice way to bring this to a great... go on then.
Alex (33:58.59)
No, no, I actually I'm really no, because I've only just remembered what you asked me before it was about the it was the most important elements to get right but then also what we see people get wrong.
Louis (34:12.686)
The biggest yeah, yeah, I didn't I don't we don't have to drag this to a negative if you don't have a list of those two
Alex (34:18.402)
No, because I think I'm not being biased here. Obviously, I wasn't the only person to work on our website. There was it was a collaborative effort. But I think the thing that is a bugbear for me, and again, it's just a personal thing, and probably for most designers as well as white space, man. Just just let let information breathe. You know, let design breathe, give it the space that it needs. So people can can consume it can understand it. And the one thing that
Yeah, I see all the time is from a request point of view from what you see on West is clients trying to fit so much in because they're so worried that they're not saying something that they say everything all at once. And it just leads to such a confusing, overwhelming experience. And I think that yeah, fine, like we know content is so important from like the the
the technical side of things and search and all that kind of thing. But just because you've got a lot to say doesn't mean it can't be said in a kind of a really concise, engaging and like a way that just doesn't mean that you've got so many words and so many kind of H1 tags, H2 tags all in your face all at once because it's going to do the opposite. I can't stress that enough. Like it will have the
opposite effects because even if it drives people to your site to and where you want them to be ultimately it's going to drive them away because it's just not clear confusing and all together like an overwhelming experience for them.
Louis (35:58.454)
Yeah. whitespace. I've brought up the, that pharma digital index that you, mentioned a minute ago, and I'm not going to go onto any of these websites. so I, I don't want to do it, but if anyone's looking for some examples of people not, not respecting whitespace and making some of those mistakes that Alex has just been talking about, there's a list of them here. I think you could probably pick any of these because, I talked for it Ollie recently and
Alex (36:09.506)
You're done.
Alex (36:22.154)
Ha
Louis (36:25.174)
Each of the ones that we picked up had exactly the same problems. It was just like cramming information on. And a lot of it's like super necessary compliant information that there's no way to get around it. But I think it's just the way that it's structured. Again, not really thinking about the use case or putting themselves in the shoes of the people that are actually using it. I think that's an important one to remember. How are you scoring?
our agency website on use of white space. I didn't quite get that. you happy with it or is it still something that you have had a fight for?
Alex (36:53.762)
Yeah, I think I think it's nice. I think I'd battle like had numerous battles, you know, especially in that kind of main header section because, you know, again, like, everyone knows I don't want to bang on about statistics that go about all the times you've got like three to five seconds for people to understand what you do, blah, blah, blah, all that kind of stuff. It's really important. But yeah, that was obviously kind of a major, a major point in our redesign of our website.
Louis (36:58.421)
Hahaha
Alex (37:23.912)
is just to like really simply in the simplest way possible to convey like who it is that we are, what it is that we do and who we do it for and I think we do it really well if I don't say so myself, if I do say so myself.
Louis (37:42.862)
Nice. All right. Well, thank you for that. That's been an enlightening chat for me. I think I'm always coming to you for design related questions. It's just like an area that I'm endlessly fascinated about. And I think we've just touched on stuff. Like I said, I'd quite like to turn this into a series where I just pull up shit designs and ask you to critique them. Maybe we'll keep that off the airwaves. Oh, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I wouldn't actually put you in that position.
Alex (38:02.432)
Yeah. God. It's going to make me sound like such an ob though, because I'll be like, God, that's so, that's so disgusting. but no,
Louis (38:09.294)
Well maybe we just do nice designs and we just talk through why.get instead.
Alex (38:12.576)
Yeah, yeah, maybe we could pick out some of the best. There's so much, yeah, obviously, there's just so many good things, websites and brands out there that do it like so, so well. And yeah, it's just every time you go online, whether it's on your mobile, whether it's on desktop, whether it's through social media or whatever, there's just more and more points of reference in terms of, yeah, they just do it so, so well. And yeah, I think if we can...
grab the healthcare pharma industry and just improve what we see, what we know exists out there by like 10, 20 % even. I think from a patient and user perspective, it's just gonna make so much difference. And I think that's kind of our mission, right? That's kind of our goal. We just wanna enable digital experiences for our end users, which are patients at the end of the day.
Louis (39:08.91)
Yeah, absolutely. Well said. All right. Well, you've done another good ending. So thank you for that. Bringing it back around and signing it off in a way. Yeah, I think so. I think that's good. All right. Thanks for joining me today, Alex, and I'll speak to you soon.
Alex (39:15.057)
was that sign off? Okay. Nice.
Alex (39:21.696)
Yeah, great speech, mate. Bye bye.