There are countless guidelines, templates and tools that are supposed to make web design easier. So why is it still tricky to get it right after all these years? In our experience, the main challenge in web design relates to originality. Most companies we meet work on entirely new products, so we often get involved with the essential question of how to best explain their solution.
When a company has something new to say, clarity is essential. We think the best way to achieve this is by assembling a client’s key messages into different layers. Each layer should make sense on its own and at the same time feel like a natural part of the whole. It’s like making a layer cake where you can’t mix ingredients randomly.
BLOODLESS BLOOD TeSTS
General Prognostics (GPx) is a startup that develops “bloodless blood tests” for people with chronic heart conditions. We helped them design their app CardioID, a solution that assist patients recovering from heart failure. Next, GPx asked us to help them design a new web site to promote CardioID and explain the underlying machine learning platform that makes it possible.
Loyal to the principle of “show, don’t tell”, we try to communicate through visuals as much as possible. How could we show the patient-friendly ethos of GPx in combination with information about their advanced platform? Would it even be possible to visualise something like “predictive algorithms trained on a database of blood biomarkers?”
THREE BASIC LAYERS
After analysing all the concepts that GPx’s audience needs to understand, we started sorting images, visualisations and texts into three basic layers: People, Solution and Platform.
People
All of GPx’s work boils down to their goal of providing people with better health care, so we collected several pictures of patients and care givers.
Solution
We combined the people pictures with overlays showing parts of GPx’s solution, such as data and images from the CardioID app. To prevent overwhelming the audience with all the details of screenshots, we simplified parts of CardioID into “TV makeup” images that highlight the key features of the solution.
Platform
Finally, we approached the more technical and abstract layers of the GPx machine learning platform. After some experimentation, we found neat ways to visualise data and code as images that show the step-by-step process that the company uses to build their products.
A REPEATABLE RECIPE?
In hindsight, a lot of design and communication decisions might seem easy, but we can assure you they’re not. While we discovered that the recipe of "People, Solution, and Platform" layers worked excellently for GPx, it is unlikely to be the perfect formula for every team we work with.
When working with innovative companies like GPx, there are few shortcuts to good web design. We’re interested in seeing what generative AI tools might be able to automate in the future, but we suspect that they will struggle to solve the trickiest parts of the design process. Maybe you might be able to whip up something that looks like a web page or a cake in a couple of minutes, but will it really be tasty?