New Opportunities for Ad Sales
The editorial team wanted to feature “evergreen” and serialized content around a single medical condition for both physicians and patients. MedPage Today is generally known for medical news and research geared towards the medical provider. Product design was tasked with visually communicating to our readers that these new articles were parts of a whole with accompanying content for patients.
The information architecture design came first. All the Medical Journeys would live on a page. We would have a page for each journey with a step-by-step guide that would have links to articles. Each article also features a downloadable handout for patients. In order to emphasize this content was part of a new series, we used images with a style distinct from other content on MedPage Today.
After building a prototype of a Medical Journey, I tested the experience with 12 licensed and practicing physicians. We found the participants understood and were excited about the concept of Medical Journeys. However, some of the feature names were not as intuitive as initially thought. For example, “Patient Notes” was changed to “Patient Handout” to prevent confusion.
The Medical Journeys have been a success. The pilot garnered 1.5 million in advertising revenue. Because of their popularity, the business has allowed us to iterate on the article templates in order to make it easier for users to navigate from one article in the series to the next.
