A Guide to Digital Front Doors in Healthcare

Posted on July 30, 2024 by Kopius

As the healthcare field rapidly evolves, the digital front door has become a valuable strategy for leveraging technology to deliver a better patient experience while reducing costs. A digital front door encompasses a conglomeration of features, from online appointment scheduling to telehealth visits, all selected to create cohesive, engaging, and high-value interactions.

What Is a Digital Front Door in Healthcare?

In healthcare, the definition of a digital front door encompasses a strategy for engaging with patients through user-friendly digital technology. It often uses technology the patients already have, like a smartphone and app, that unifies the patient experience and connects patients to care across the continuum. In short, a digital front door connects and scales the virtual care journey to give patients what they need, when they need it.

This idea started with traditional patient portals, and the digital front door has evolved to include a more overarching approach centered around patient-centered care and accessibility. Data-driven, highly personalized customer brands like Amazon and Apple are expanding into the healthcare sphere, so staying competitive with consumer-oriented experiences will be nothing short of crucial.

Take appointment scheduling, for example. Surveys show that 67% of patients prefer booking appointments online, and an overwhelming 95% of them are either “somewhat” or “much more” likely to choose a service provider offering online booking. Unsurprisingly, online appointment scheduling is one of the most prominent elements of digital front doors in healthcare.

Some providers use one robust application or portal to meet a virtual front door strategy, although you can do it with multiple systems. Features you might have in a digital front door solution include:

Self-scheduling and care coordination.
Bill pay and payment plans.
Provider communications.
Appointment reminders.
Telehealth.
Virtual forms, such as intake and consent management.
Virtual check-in and pre-registration.
Kiosks for in-office check-in.
Data collection and analytics.

How Does a Digital Front Door Enhance the Patient Experience?

One of the primary goals of digital front doors is to improve the patient experience, which comes with various benefits for patients and providers, like improved clinical outcomes, adherence, and loyalty. With the industry’s shift to value-based programs, designing a great experience throughout the patient journey can also support increased revenue while reducing costs through efficient care delivery.

Using a digital front door helps improve experiences in many areas, such as:

Improving accessibility with flexible, personalized tools.
Supporting providers in delivering more attentive, effective, and efficient care.
Empowering customers to actively manage their health.
Meeting customers where they’re at with appropriate digital technology and options.
Boosting patient loyalty through easy-to-use, convenient, and engaging programs.
Reducing wait times with self-serve resources and streamlined care delivery.

These benefits often overlap and build upon each other. For example, when patients use self-service tools to check in early or submit forms, they reduce wait times in the office and help providers work more efficiently.

Patient Portals vs. Digital Front Doors

While patient portals are often a central element to digital front doors, they shouldn’t reflect your entire strategy. These systems do a great job of putting digital tools in one easy-to-access space. However, they often lack user-friendly designs. Many providers use portals offered by the company that built their electronic health record (EHR). EHRs are complex, unwieldy, and designed for providers. Translating the information into a consumer-friendly program proves challenging.

Similarly, portals may not offer tools to help providers in nonclinical aspects of care. A comprehensive digital front door strategy drives digital innovation through insights, like collecting information on how patients interact with you and how those interactions affect their care journeys. It also provides a more personalized, patient-centric approach. For example, you might offer educational resources for a patient with a new diagnosis, or you could prompt someone to activate reminders after they missed a payment.

Although patient portals are highly valuable, digital front doors address their shortcomings to create more cohesive and user-friendly experiences.

How Data Analytics Drive Healthcare Digital Front Doors

Data analytics is a cornerstone of digital front doors in healthcare. It can help you personalize care and make technology decisions based on real-world data about your patients and services.

Say you collect surveys from patients about their preferred payment methods. You find that many people pay larger sums with credit cards because they don’t have the funds available. With this new insight, you add payment plans to your online portal, helping more people afford care and offering a better experience, simultaneously boosting accessibility and satisfaction.

Leveraging data analytics solutions can help you identify new opportunities of all kinds and measure the efficacy of your digital front door strategy.

6 Tips for Implementing a Digital Front Door

Implementing a virtual front door requires thoughtful planning and consideration for various aspects of your practice. Consider these digital front door implementation tips to boost your chances of success.

1. Craft a Robust Digital Front Door Strategy

Malia Jacobson, healthcare content strategist at Valence, suggests you start by identifying your overarching goals. “When embarking on a digital effort in healthcare, it’s important to start by understanding which changes you need to see in the organization. Are you pursuing improved patient satisfaction scores? Physician satisfaction? ED/Urgent Care wait times? Quality and safety scores? Each area targeted for improvement may influence priorities differently.”

Many healthcare providers are developing digital solutions to address patient satisfaction, reduce service demand, and reduce administrative overhead. In addition to standard features of a digital front door experience, providers should consider designing for experiences such as:

Self-service: Provide tools for bill pay, self-scheduling, care coordination, and finding providers to offer streamlined and convenient access.
Provider messaging and patient outreach: Improve access, loyalty, and engagement.
Information and imaging libraries: Support patient and provider education.
Practice management: Capacity and census management, forecasting, and discharge planning streamline operations.
Insights-driven capabilities: Capabilities like infectious disease tracking, forecasting, and population health initiatives support proactive planning and informed decision-making.
Premium privacy and security: Safeguard patient data and meet compliance requirements.
Adoption-focused activities: Gamification and push notifications help increase awareness and usage of the program.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation features: Features like chatbots reduce clinical burden and improve patient flow.
Support for healthcare information exchange: Stay in compliance with Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standards and best practices.

As you ideate your digital products and strategy, it’s important to understand how these features interplay as part of a big-picture roadmap with a rollout timeline and strategy. You don’t have to release everything at once to be successful, and adding features as the platform develops and collects user feedback will future-proof the effort.

2. Keep Your Users Front and Center

“While a digital front door is a technology solution, it’s ultimately about humanizing the patient experience,” says Sam To, designer at Valence.

In the case of a digital front door, the users may be patients, families of patients, or healthcare providers. In nearly all scenarios, people value products that are easy to use and simple to set up and that follow a logical progression. This is especially true in a healthcare situation, which may be hypercharged by personal and situational stressors.

Equitable design should be at the forefront of design decisions because the healthcare organization needs to design for a wide array of users and needs. Fully understanding equitable design is critical to any digital front door strategy.

The design phase of the digital front door project should include user interviews, feedback sessions, prototyping, and more. Giving the UX/UI design team access to users early in the process can help to identify the best-case rollout strategy, reveal opportunities to differentiate from competitors, and deliver precisely the right content to users when they need it — all leading to better patient satisfaction scores.

3. Ensure System Interoperability and Integration

Healthcare organizations often use a wide array of technologies and programs. Your digital front door must connect with relevant systems. For instance, some businesses offer “online scheduling” by having the user submit a form. Then, the provider calls the patient to schedule the appointment. By seamlessly connecting an online tool with your scheduling system, you can provide a much better experience with real-time availability and no time commitment from your team.

Some programs offer easy integrations, while others require clever workarounds. However it happens, integration and interoperability are essential for creating cohesive experiences, achieving efficiency, and maximizing the value of your systems.

4. Get the Right Stakeholders Involved

Yuri Brigance, Valence’s director of software engineering, says, “This is more than a digital shift — the shift to a digital front door requires a culture shift within the organization.”

Experience has taught us that having the right people in the room can make all the difference in the success or failure of a major initiative, especially considering the role that change management plays here. People don’t resist change — they resist being changed. You must engage stakeholders from all impacted groups, from frontline workers to back-office operations. This engagement improves requirements documentation, roadmap planning, and buy-in as the work rolls out.

5. Uphold Security and Patient Privacy

Of course, all digital technology in the healthcare field demands top-notch security. However complex your system is, security and privacy help foster trust, maintain a good reputation, and ensure compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and FHIR.

While connecting people and systems, include robust data security compliance practices, such as risk assessments, monitoring, reporting, and training.

6. Use KPIs and Feedback to Measure Success

Key performance indicators (KPIs) and feedback from patients and providers allow you to measure your success after launching a digital front door and long after implementation. Incorporate a data strategy to collect and evaluate this information. Identify metrics relevant to your goals, decide how you’ll collect data, and regularly revisit KPIs to continuously improve upon your strategy.

Get Started on Your Digital Front Door Solution

Building a digital front door requires much more than buying a new software system. This comprehensive strategy requires careful analysis and expert development for your organization’s unique characteristics. With an effective strategy, a digital front door can transform your approach to patient engagement, driving innovation, increasing revenue, and boosting patient satisfaction.

At Kopius, we’ve designed a program to JumpStart your customer, technology, and data success.

Our JumpStart program fast-tracks business results and platform solutions. Connect with us today to enhance your customer satisfaction through a data-driven approach, drive innovation through emerging technologies, and achieve competitive advantage.

Add our brainpower to your operation by contacting our team to JumpStart your business.

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Guide to Design Thinking: Human-Centered Innovation

Posted on May 21, 2024 by Kopius

Design thinking approaches complex challenges from user perspectives. This problem-solving framework helps companies develop effective solutions and turn their ideas into tangible products or services that will grow their customer base. Using a design thinking approach with expert support expands your customer base and increases revenue.

What Is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is a human-centered design and problem-solving framework. It’s a methodology that focuses on human behavior to make product and marketing decisions. In the design thinking framework, companies analyze data to predict human behavior, determining how they can adjust their products, services, and marketing strategies to better reach and serve their target audience. It’s also an excellent way to expand a target audience and reach a wider customer base.

Design Thinking Principles

Design thinking is based on the following five principles:

Empathy and user-centricity
Collaboration
Ideation
Experimentation and iteration
Hands-on problem-solving and action

Empathy and action are two of the main principles that set design thinking apart from other business strategy models. At its most basic level, design thinking is about getting to know your customer base and taking action to meet their needs.

How Does Design Thinking Work?

Design thinking works by providing insight into who consumers or users are. It analyzes how people think, feel, and act so companies can understand what challenges their target audiences face and what their needs are. With this valuable information, businesses can strategize how to meet consumer needs and preferences effectively.

Benefits of the Design Thinking Model

The design thinking methodology offers the following advantages.

Future-Focused Decision-Making

The design thinking framework is an effective way to analyze what future customers want. It’s more effective than traditional problem-solving methods that only focus on backward-looking data. Design thinking allows companies to look forward and expand rather than remain stagnant and simply maintain their current profits and growth rates.

Greater Reliability

Using a design thinking framework helps companies make careful, calculated decisions based on accurate predictions. It prevents decision-makers from leaning on instinct and making risky bets. Design thinking provides individuals with the evidence to make informed decisions they can trust to produce positive outcomes.

Design Thinking Process

The design thinking process happens in the following four stages:

Evaluate: The evaluation stage consists of assessing your current processes and products. Participant observations, technology assessments, and stakeholder interviews provide insights into the current state of your business.
Learn: The second stage of the design thinking process involves analyzing evaluation results. With these results, you can learn more about where your company succeeds and where improvements can help the most. From business priorities to unmet user needs, this step in the process provides a clear view of how you can best move your products and processes forward.
Model: The modeling stage is when you begin to generate ideas and test them. This stage involves prioritizing critical needs, co-creating innovative solutions, developing product plans, and testing proofs-of-concept.
Execute: The execution stage is when you determine the best approach from your ideas and proofs-of-concept. During this phase, you use defined product journeys and a technology roadmap to bring your best plans to life.

Design Thinking Steps

To implement the model’s three stages, you must carry out these important design thinking steps:

1. Empathize

Empathy may not seem like an essential corporate problem-solving skill, but it’s the most crucial part of design thinking. Empathizing with users and consumers enables you to understand who they are and how your products or services can meet their needs. The following concepts are important when empathizing with your target audience:

Observing Human Behavior

Observation, engagement, and immersion enable you to spend time with the people using or potentially using your products. You can do so with the following types of tools and methods:

Research: Traditional research involves looking to the past to evaluate what has worked and what hasn’t.
Interviews and surveys: Distributing questionnaires and surveys allows you to gather information and opinions directly from your consumers, learning more about their habits, interests, motivations, and needs.
Shadowing: Shadowing is an excellent way to observe how customers use your products or services. For example, you may allow potential customers to try your products at a trade show and observe how they react to it. You can also visit stores and observe how people interact with your product. Notice what type of questions they ask before making a purchase, and ask them how they feel about the product if they are open to talking.
Documentary: Creating a video of your product or service in use gives your team a closer look at human interaction with it so they can identify areas for improvement.
Body language: A person’s body language while using a product can reveal how they feel about it. For example, hunching their shoulders or keeping their arms crossed shows they are not excited about a product, while a straight posture reveals they feel positive about it.
Journals: Asking product users or testers to keep journals or document detailed notes about their use can also provide insight into how well that product meets consumer needs.

Qualitative and quantitative data are both important when learning about and empathizing with consumers. Quantitative data consists of information such as how many times people click on an ad or purchase a product. Quantitative data is based more on visual and observational research methods. It reveals more insight into a target audience’s feelings and needs, giving you the information you need to complete the next step.

Questioning Human Behavior

To empathize with consumers means to get to know who they are on a deeper level. Rather than limiting your research to what they purchase or don’t purchase, you can look closer at what drives their decisions and motivates their purchasing. Empathy is more than observing human behavior — it’s questioning it. Ask yourself the following questions about your target audience to learn how you can develop the product or service they need:

What specific challenges do they face?
What is important to them?
What do they worry about?
What are their responsibilities?
What products or services do they prioritize?

2. Define

Empathizing with consumers leads you into the next step of the design thinking process, which is identifying problems or pain points and creating a problem statement. You must create a human-centered problem statement by focusing on consumer needs over business goals. The problem statement serves as a guide your company can reference when focusing on or refocusing its strategy and efforts.

3. Ideate

After learning about consumer behavior, identifying needs, and creating a problem statement, a company can begin to ideate. Effective ideation requires collaboration. Working as a team to brainstorm and discuss ideas is the best way to develop solutions that will meet user needs. During this step, key individuals should gather to explore various angles and think outside the box.

4. Prototype

Prototyping may consist of paper models, interactive digital mockups, or physical models. The primary goal of the prototyping step is to develop something tangible you can test on real people.

5. Test

Once your prototype is ready, you can test it and make adjustments as necessary. Testing your prototype allows you to improve an idea before investing in the resources, supplies, equipment, and labor necessary to mass-produce your product for distribution. You want to ensure your finished product meets consumer needs effectively, so the testing phase is crucial.

6. Adjust

The design thinking process helps you strategize and implement ideas quickly, and its success relies on your ability to pivot and adjust as necessary. Testing a prototype aims to find areas for improvement, so you and your team may find yourselves repeating steps as you observe consumer reactions and identify new needs. This may seem counterproductive, but it moves your company forward. The more you are willing to adjust your ideas and prototypes, the more successful your final product or service will be.

7. Produce and Distribute

Testing and adjusting your product enables you to refine it to its greatest form, ensuring your resource and labor costs result in a high return on investment. After observing reactions and making improvements, you can gather the necessary supplies, workforce, and equipment necessary to start the production, sales, and distribution process.

Design Thinking Tips

Consider the following tips to optimize your design thinking process and get the most out of it:

Eliminate Biases

Biases and judgments about a particular demographic can lead to inaccurate assumptions. For example, you may falsely assume only consumers up to age 35 are interested in running shoes or workout equipment due to an age bias. Eliminating this bias allows you to think creatively and reach a wider customer base. You might design special workout equipment that meets the needs of older individuals.

The same concept applies to other biases related to gender, race, socioeconomic class, culture, and ethnicity. When you remove biases and judgments from your thought patterns, you can identify consumers’ abilities, interests, and needs more effectively.

Pay Attention to Inconsistencies

Inconsistencies between what people say and what they do can reveal more of their motivations. Paying attention to these inconsistencies can help you design a product or service that meets needs they may not be aware they have. For example, people may say they have good organizational skills but display poor organizational skills while using a new app or software program. Noticing this inconsistency can help your team develop a more user-friendly interface that helps people organize their data, documents, contacts, and communications.

Ask Neutral Questions

You can learn more from people by asking neutral questions. For example, “How do you feel about your meal kits’ cooking instructions?” is a more open-ended question than “Do you find your meal kits’ instructions easy to follow?” The first question encourages consumers to reflect on their experience without your opinion, while the second may prompt them to agree with you. Remember that the goal is to gather honest answers, not persuade customers to praise the product.

Capture Details

Capturing detailed answers allows you to go back over your conversations with customers and analyze their answers. Writing detailed notes while conversing with a customer is difficult, so it’s best to have another person take notes and write answers verbatim while you interview consumers. Voice recording is another excellent option if you can’t take another person with you.

Rethink Personalization

The design thinking model is also essential for your marketing and product engagement strategies. After learning about your target audience on a deeper level, you can evaluate your marketing materials and personalized messaging to reach them better and establish your product as a more valuable brand.

Prioritize Action Over Perfection

When you reach the prototyping phase of design thinking, action is crucial. Creating a flawed prototype is better than hesitating when you’re unsure about a detail or decision. Pushing uncertainties to the side allows you and your team to take fast action and develop a prototype you can learn from and refine as you go.

Consider Using a Design Thinking Consultant

A design thinking consultant can increase your chances of success. Professional consultants have the digital technology, expertise, and tools to implement design thinking strategies in any industry. While any company can use the design thinking framework, a consultant, as a neutral party, may be best suited to navigate varying stakeholders’ opinions and optimize your strategy for the best business results.

Start Your Design Thinking Journey at Kopius

At Kopius, we’ve designed a program to JumpStart your customer, technology, and data success.

Tailored to your needs, our user-centric approach, tech smarts, and collaboration with your stakeholders equip teams with the skills and mindset needed to:

Identify unmet customer, employee, or business needs
Align on priorities
Rapidly prototype solutions
And, fast-forward to success

Tailored Workshops and Ideation Sessions

Kopius brings fresh perspectives to your company through our JumpStart program. Our experts work closely with your company’s key stakeholders to align on business priorities and uncover new product ideas, while also evaluating new technologies and ensuring data security and governance. Our ideation and prioritization programs accelerate your Product, Technology, and Data and AI success.

The ideation and prioritization effort helps to lay the foundation for your product plans and roadmaps, also giving us the ability to test and validate through proofs-of-concept. As you begin implementing your product roadmap, you can continue consulting with us for additional direction. Our global perspective and nearshore consulting enable us to be there for you when you need us most.

End-to-End Delivery Model

Kopuis uses an all-inclusive approach to design thinking solutions. This end-to-end delivery model handles your ideas and needs from concept to digital product development and ongoing maintenance. Partnering with our team provides you with long-term strategic problem-solving you can depend on.

Increase Innovation With Kopius’s JumpStart Program

Respond to changing consumer, business, and technology needs with agility and innovation by working with Kopius as your Product Ideation & Prioritization partner.

From consumer evaluation to idea conceptualization and action planning, we will help you realize digital technology concepts that allow your business to embrace a changing future and maintain efficiency. Add our brainpower to your operation by contacting our team to JumpStart your business. Contact us to learn more about our JumpStart program to unlock your potential.

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Digital Transformation Trends that Future-Proof Your Business

Posted on September 21, 2023 by Kopius

The core of future-proofing your business lies in the incorporation of cutting-edge technological trends and strategic digitization of your business operations. Combining new, transformative solutions with tried-and-true business methods is not only a practical approach but an essential one when competing in this digital age. Using the latest digital transformation trends as your guide, start envisioning the journey of future-proofing your business in order to unlock the opportunities of tomorrow.

#1 Personalization

The importance of personalized customer experiences should not be understated. More than ever, consumers are faced with endless options. To stand out from competitors, businesses must use data and customer behavior insights to curate tailored and dynamic customer journeys that both delight and command their audience. Analyze purchasing history, demographics, web activity, and other data to understand your customer, as well as their likes and dislikes. Use these insights to design customized customer experiences that increase conversion, retention, and ultimately, satisfaction.

#2 Artificial Intelligence

AI is everywhere. From autonomous vehicles and smart homes to digital assistants and chatbots, artificial intelligence is being used in a wide array of applications to improve, simplify, and speed up the tasks of everyday life. For businesses, AI and machine learning have the power to extract and decipher large amounts of data that can help predict trends and forecasts, deliver interactive personalized customer experiences, and streamline operational processes. Companies that lean on AI-driven decisions are propelled into a world of efficiency, precision, automation, and competitiveness.

#3 Sustainability

Enterprises, particularly those in the manufacturing industry, face increasing pressure to act more responsibly and consider environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) goals when making business decisions. Digital transformations are one way to support internal sustainable development because they lead to reduced waste, optimized resource use, and improved transparency. With sustainability in mind, businesses can build their data and technology infrastructures to reduce impact. For example, companies can switch to more energy-efficient hardware or decrease electricity consumption by migrating to the cloud.

#4 Cloud Migration

More and more companies are migrating their data from on-premises to the cloud. In fact, by 2027, it is estimated that 50% of all enterprises will use cloud services¹. What is the reason behind this massive transition? Cost saving is one of the biggest factors. Leveraging cloud storage platforms eliminates the need for expensive data centers and server hardware, thereby reducing major infrastructure expenditures. And while navigating a cloud migration project can seem challenging, many turn to cloud computing partners to lead the data migration and ensure a painless shift.

Future-Proof Your Business Through Digital Transformation with Kopius

Innovating technology is crucial, or your business will be left behind. Our expertise in technology and business helps our clients deliver tangible outcomes and accelerate growth. At Kopius, we’ve designed a program to JumpStart your customer, technology, and data success.

Kopius has an expert emerging tech team. We bring this expertise to your JumpStart program and help uncover innovative ideas and technologies supporting your business goals. We bring fresh perspectives while focusing on your current operations to ensure the greatest success.

Partner with Kopius and JumpStart your future success.

How the Digital Front Door is Transforming Healthcare

Posted on June 20, 2023 by Kopius

With over 10,000 digital health solutions to choose from and hundreds of applications inside many health services organizations, our healthcare industry is drowning in a chaotic ecosystem of technology management. Furthermore, patients are suffering from poor, disjointed experiences. To combat this phenomenon, companies are adopting what is known as a “Digital Front Door.” This term has become increasingly important in the health services space, representing the virtual omnichannel engagement strategy by which a provider interacts with their patients or members. Unfortunately, the Digital Front Door solutions on the market today are often too narrow in their ability to deliver a seamless experience across the entire customer journey.

Benefits of Implementing a Digital Front Door Strategy

In an age where convenience and personalization are not just preferred, but expected, healthcare must invest in the right technology to understand their people and processes, all while eliminating patient pain points. This requires capabilities that are not just about accessibility. Instead, healthcare organizations should prioritize comprehensive engagement strategies like the Digital Front Door, which focus on transforming the patient experience and improving health outcomes. The resulting benefits can be plentiful:

Streamlined Access: Eliminate the need for patients to navigate through complex healthcare systems. With a few clicks, patients should be able to schedule appointments, access health records, engage with healthcare providers, and receive personalized care recommendations.
Personalized Care: Deliver personalized care recommendations based on each patient’s unique health profile. This means care that is tailored to the individual, leading to improved health outcomes.
Enhanced Patient Engagement: Foster active patient engagement by providing access to health education resources, personalized health reminders, and interactive tools for tracking health progress.
Improved Operational Efficiency: Automate routine tasks like appointment scheduling and reminders, thus freeing up valuable time for healthcare providers to focus on what they do best caring for patients.

Designing a Digital Front Door

Coming out of COVID, a major health system in the Southwest United States was dealing with problems across marketing, IT, and patient experience. Our team was asked to design and develop a Digital Front Door solution to deliver seamless, personalized, and intuitive healthcare experiences. We built a patient-oriented digital wrapper that sits around their EMR and other digital investments. This enhances the ease and personalization associated with several patient activities including scheduling appointments, accessing health records, and interacting with healthcare providers.

Partner With Kopius for Digital Front Door Solutions

At Kopius, we’ve designed a program to JumpStart your customer, technology, and data success.

Add our brainpower to your operation by contacting our team to JumpStart your business.

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5 Ways to Build Digital Trust

Posted on May 11, 2022 by Kopius

By Malia Jacobson

Combating online misinformation and building digital trust are increasingly important for organizations doing business online. Here are a few ways that our developers and content producers work together to improve access to reliable, trustworthy content for our clients.

The Internet is filled with impressive technology platforms that we use every day. But should we trust their content? For years, content platforms evolved to focus on the technology itself, not the content within. The result: Wary consumers who distrust much of what they read online. False online information costs the global economy $78 billion each year, and three-quarters of Americans believe online misinformation is a big problem. Let’s not forget the “infodemic” of public health misinformation that researchers believe contributed to the spread of COVID-19.

Per the International Data Corporation (IDC), false information destroys the trust that fuels our digital economy. Simply put, if website visitors don’t trust your organization’s digital content, they won’t stick around long enough to become a customer.

Organizations can win and keep users’ trust by creating trustworthy, reliable content. How? As developers and content producers, we help organizations improve content quality, clarity, and accuracy with these steps.

1. Include content producers and stakeholders in platform design.

At the beginning of a project, bring stakeholders, content producers, and developers together to identify the platform’s key audiences, desired user experience (UX), and the internal process through which content will be vetted, approved, moved through QA, and posted. Defining a process to validate and approve content prior to publication helps inform the development of the right back-end content management system. This ensures that the finished platform supports the publication of content that’s worthy of users’ time—and trust.

2. Help organizations use and optimize owned media channels.

An organization’s digital marketing efforts include paid, earned, shared, and owned media channels—the organization’s own website, blog, and other outlets within its control. While earned media (press mentions) and shared media (social shares) are exciting, many organizations learn the hard way that information published on external media platforms isn’t always accurate, and fighting misinformation is a draining, costly battle. Organizations with robust owned media channels can build and keep digital trust by carefully and consistently publishing reliable, accurate content on their own platforms to serve as a source of truth for users.

3. Address racial and gender bias in content platform design.

Poor platform design can invite discrimination and reduce the integrity of digital content. Take AirBnB’s efforts to create a more transparent platform by removing anonymity for both guests and hosts during the booking process. Researchers found that revealing a potential guest’s photo before a booking request was accepted allowed hosts to discriminate based on race. To create more equitable, trustworthy, transparent platforms, consider withholding sensitive information that could enable discrimination; build awareness of algorithmic bias; and measure the effectiveness of different platform design choices. (Find more information here: Harvard Business School: How Online Platforms Can Thwart Discrimination.)

4. Bridge language barriers.

Online misinformation disproportionately targets users with language and learning differences. Organizations can work to combat online misinformation by using plain language online and addressing language barriers by integrating language translation APIs like Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, and Smartling.

5. Make digital content user-friendly.

The most sophisticated platform will inhibit trust if users can’t follow along. We learned how this is especially critical for healthcare organizations, public agencies, and firms operating in the health and wellness industry during the COVID pandemic. Creating platforms that support user-friendly visual aids, symbols, and a clear pathway through complex topics helps users find and understand reliable, trustworthy information they need.

Prioritizing content quality and accuracy may be new for organizations used to focusing on platform design. But when content producers and developers work together to publish trustworthy, reliable content, organizations and their audiences win.

JumpStart Your Future with Kopius

At Kopius, we’ve designed a program to JumpStart your customer, technology, and data success. Our JumpStart program fast-tracks business results and platform solutions. Connect with us today to enhance your customer satisfaction through a data-driven approach, drive innovation through emerging technologies, and achieve competitive advantage.

Add our brainpower to your operation by contacting our team to JumpStart your business.

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14 Ways to Design and Develop a More Sustainable Website

Posted on April 21, 2022 by Kopius

By Deborah Keltner

Could you have a more sustainable website?

While the shift from analog to digital content has kept trees out of paper mills, it has undoubtedly contributed to the climate crisis because of the carbon footprint of technology. Whether it’s e-waste or energy needed for computing, the tech sector has a huge opportunity to lessen its impact on our earth’s climate.

We need to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century to keep the global temperature below 1.5 degrees Celsius. You can learn more about Earth Day and its supporting events & initiatives here.

In honor of Earth Day, we are sharing a list of ideas, tips, tricks, and insights to help website designers and developers deliver more sustainable websites. We are still learning more about how to deliver more sustainable technologies, so if you have additional tips and tricks, we want to hear from you!

Let’s get started!

You are reading this on the internet! Did you know that the use of the internet alone causes emissions of approximately 2,330,000 tons of carbon and consumes 2,340,000 MWh of electricity every day? If you found this article via a web search, your search consumed about 0.3 Wh of energy and released 0.2g of carbon into the environment. It’s not much on its own, but it adds up.

Do you want to reduce your website’s carbon emissions?

Did you know: Offsetting the carbon from our website requires the work of 12 trees every year.

You can reduce the carbon emissions associated with your website by reducing the amount of electricity used to load, send, and view a web page, and then ensuring the resulting electricity required to access and use the site comes from clean, renewable resources.

Designers and developers have a lot of influence over the energy efficiency of the websites they design and create. Here are 14 tips for you to design and develop a greener an more sustainable website:

Get rid of unnecessary code, which uses computing power without benefiting users. If you have large blocks of commented-out code, don’t let it slip into production. Keep code clean and simple, avoid duplication and write efficient queries. This doesn’t just apply to the code you write, but also to the code you borrow. If you use existing frameworks and libraries, ensure that they are also refined and tailored to efficiently deliver the functionality you need and that you are not using over-built code. In cases where you are using a CMS like WordPress, avoid unnecessary plugins that add bloat and choose plugins that minimize server load and don’t add unnecessary weight on the front end.
Use compression. Some compression techniques can save data without compromising quality.
Consider programming language efficiency when choosing between programming languages. Less efficient languages have a higher carbon footprint.
Run computations on the server side. Data centers are more efficient than end-user devices.
Choose green cloud vendors. Ask whether your cloud provider uses sustainable energy sources.
Keep digital efficiency top-of-mind. Every day is Earth Day when you are prioritizing energy-efficient decisions. Our site is run on renewable energy, which helps offset our impact.
The goals of SEO are aligned with the goal of reducing energy consumption. When optimizing a website for search rankings, we help people find the information they want quickly and easily. When SEO is successful, people spend less time looking for information and visiting fewer pages that don’t meet their needs. This means less energy is consumed and the energy that is consumed is used to deliver value to the user.
Copywriting also impacts the amount of time people spend browsing your site. We don’t want people to waste time sifting through content that offers them little value, so clear and efficient copy can reduce wasted time and in turn reduce wasted energy.
Good user experience makes using the web easier and reduces the amount of energy wasted navigating to pages that don’t serve the correct purpose and trying to decipher what they should do next. Obviously, our UX Design team is here to help!
On most websites, images are the single largest contributor to page weight. The more images you use and the larger those image files, the more data needs to be transferred and the more energy is used. Regardless of any technical optimizations, designers and content creators should think carefully about their use of images.
- Does the image genuinely add value to the user?
- Does it communicate useful information?
- Could the same impact be achieved if the image was smaller?
- Could we reduce images that are not visible to the user, such as in carousels?
- Could we achieve the same effect with a vector graphic (or even CSS style) instead of a photo?
Video is the most data and processing intensive form of content. As with images, ask yourself if videos are necessary. If they are, reduce the amount of video streamed by removing auto-play from videos and by keeping video content short. A website with video playing can be one or even two orders of magnitude heavier than a website without video in terms of page weight and creates much higher load on the users CPU, resulting in vastly greater energy consumption.
Web fonts can add significant file weight to the websites on which they are used. A single font file could be as much as 250kb, and that might only be for the standard weight. If you want bold, add another 250kb. To reduce the impact on custom web fonts, designers should consider the following options: Use system fonts where possible. Fonts like Arial and Times New Roman can be used without loading any font files at all as they are already on the user’s device, and try to be frugal in the number of typefaces you choose and in the number of different weights that you use for each typeface.
Build static web pages. CMS-powered websites make queries to the website database and dynamically generate pages, so the webserver has to do work thinking about what information to send back to the user each time someone tries to load a page. That causes the server to use more energy. In some cases, it may be possible to simply server static web pages with no database at all by writing the web pages as static files in HTML, CSS, and JS, or by using a static site generator or specialist static web host to convert your CMS-powered website into static files.
Consider reducing white space and embracing dark mode. Dark websites were one of the first techniques popularized for saving energy on websites many years ago and it faded away with the advent of LCD screens, which had a permanent backlight, using the same energy regardless of the color actually visible on the screen. However, with the advent of OLED screens that light up each pixel individually, using darker colors is once again a viable technique to reduce energy on end-user devices.

If you’d like to estimate the carbon footprint of your website, this tool is easy to use. In fact, it’s how we learned that our website needs improvement (we’re currently running dirtier than 78% of similar websites and producing 2.14g of carbon every time someone visits our site). https://www.websitecarbon.com/.

You may not be able to do every single one of these things, but every action you take to produce a sustainable website adds up, so lean into greener design and engineering on Earth Day and every day!

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Designing for Good: User-Centered Design

Posted on February 2, 2022 by Kopius

We’re talking about user-centered design because ideas succeed when they translate to products, services, and experiences that users love.

So what does “user-centered design” really mean, and why is it so important right now?

To understand user-centered design, look back to the time when digital products didn’t focus on the user experience like they do today. Just 10 years ago, digital products like websites, apps, and software didn’t need to perform on multiple screen sizes or resolutions because devices were mostly standardized. Companies could create a version of their digital product for desktop devices, a distinct version for phones, and possibly another version for tablets. Many companies didn’t address accessibility and they primarily designed digital products for a single operating system. As a result, many users found technology frustrating, hindering, and downright irritating, which hindered adoption.
Kelly La Belle, Designer

A great product is a product people want to use.

Thankfully, companies addressed the user frustration, and the design process for digital products has been evolving to prioritize users ever since.

People value products that are easy to use, simple to set up, and have a logical progression. User-centered design isolates the users’ specific needs down to granular steps, then we design to be aesthetically pleasing and intuitive. To really understand the users, the design process requires user research, which can include user surveys, brainstorming, testing, and more.

There is no single approach to user-centered design. Most digital products have unique experiences that require unique solutions. An investment in a great user experience and user interface design can make the difference between success and failure.

Products that incorporate user-centered design have been proven to:

Cut down on customer service costs. More intuitive workflows result in less customer frustration and fewer service calls.
Increase sales. Customers conduct research before committing to a new product or service so first impressions online are key. A few bad online reviews about your product will result in lost sales. Rather than hire a PR firm to fix your product’s reputation, invest in a great user experience upfront to reduce the cost of sale.
Reduce lawsuits. Companies can be held legally responsible if their digital products aren’t usable for people with disabilities. Having an inaccessible digital product is in the same vein as having an inaccessible storefront. User-centered design will address accessibility as a top priority.

User-centered design is popular because it works. The digital landscape is constantly changing, so keep the user at the center of the change to ensure a great product and strong business.

Contact Kopius to JumpStart Your Success Today

Partner with Kopius and JumpStart your future success.

Want to know more about our user-focused design capabilities?

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Designing for Good: Equitable Design

Posted on January 18, 2022 by Kopius

The terms Equity and Equitable Design come up with increasing frequency as businesses are asked to be transparent about efforts to support diversity, equity, and inclusion by investors, customers, and employees.

Our designers want to make equitable designs for every client, so we have worked to understand what it means to design equitably.

Understanding Equitable Design

To quote Jennifer Wright of Designers Build, “The term equity is often used interchangeably with equality, but it is a fundamentally different concept. Equality is giving everyone the same thing. Equity is giving everyone what they need to be successful.”

This does not mean that we design everything to be equal or the same for everyone regardless of their needs. Equitable design also does not mean that we have a diversity checklist for your stock photo library.

“From my perspective, equitable design has three levels of impact: Representational, Experiential, and Cognitive-behavioral,” says Kopius UX Designer, Jacob Lowry. In the context of equitable design, we like to define the three levels of impact like this:

Representational design authentically and positively challenges societal defaults and expectations.
Experiential design focuses on accessibility, beyond WCAG or ADA accessibility to include social, cultural, and technological access. With experiential design, we design for user needs and emotions.
Cognitive-Behavioral design influences how people think and behave. In this case, to use design to help people to think and act in a way that contributes and supports a more equitable society.

Transforming Your Next Project With Equitable Design

Everyone consumes content, and designers are in the unique position of helping create that content. As Christopher Paul discusses in his book Wordplay and the Discourse of Video Games: Analyzing Words, Design, and Play, design is a powerful and important societal role – it isn’t isolated.

Most design is built for business needs and for-profit content. However, being driven by profit is not in conflict with equitable design. In fact, there is a mountain of evidence to back up the link between business effectiveness and equitable design. Companies that integrate social responsibility into their operations can expect positive financial returns. These companies also increase sales and prices while reducing employee turnover.

It happens in big and small moments.

Embracing Equitable Design for Inclusive Solutions

Designers can have the ambition for large, systematic change while operating on a niche, local, brand, or worldwide level.

Designer Rie Nørregaard said in “Designing for Humanity,” that designers should shift away from “designing for” to “designing with” by connecting with different people and contexts. When designers step back from their own experiences to connect with the user and their perspective, we can design more equitably. This is especially true for designers that are members of the default norms (white, male, able-bodied, English-speaking, etc.). How do we connect with other user experiences and needs? It can be through interviews, observations, conversations, research, and more. This is informed at Kopius by our user research team, too.

It’s simple to include equitable design in your next project because it doesn’t require a lot of research or professional development (though those can help). Equitable design simply requires a commitment to look outside of a limited worldview to find the right way to approach solutions for a more diverse set of users.

Contact Kopius for Equitable Design Solutions

At Kopius, we’ve designed a program to JumpStart your customer, technology, and data success.

Tailored to your needs, our user-centric approach, tech smarts, and collaboration with your stakeholders equip teams with the skills and mindset needed to:

Identify unmet customer, employee, or business needs
Align on priorities
Rapidly prototype solutions
And, fast-forward success

Gather your best and brightest business-minded individuals and join our experts for a hands-on workshop that encourages innovation and drives new ideas.

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