Child Mind Institute

Project Overview

I was the lead designer for the information architecture and visual design for the new website. Child Mind Institute is a global leader in children’s mental health care, research and education.

Services

Design System · Web Design

Agency

Constructive

Creating more pathways to care

Some of the issues with the old Child Mind Institute site's were :

• The website's structure and pathways made it confusing to accessing mental health resources and care options
• The outdated Content Management System limited the editorial team's vision and ability to make related content connections.
• The new site needed to reach a wider more inclusive audience with a focus on rural, low-income, and latinx audiences.

One of main project objectives was to create more pathways for families to connect with the right mental health resources. We acomplished this through a new Resource Finder, Connect to Care page, and updated topic pages.

User research, testing, and analytics informed every UX decision

The information architecture and wireframe phase of the project was informed deeply by several research key activities:

• Developed analytics insights based their current traffic and conversion goals
• Audit the current content (over 2000 articles and guides)
• Develop audiences personas and journey mapping
  
• Held Stakeholder workshops and interviews
  

We developed and tested wireframes based on their digital service design, mapping people who are curious about children mental health to actively booking appointments and sharing helpful resources. Our wireframes were influenced directly through several rounds of user testing, ensuring the right audience knew exactly where to access the right information

Documenting the Backend

We made an extensive spreadsheet outlining all the content-types and taxonomies on the current and new site's Wordpress backend. This allowed the client, project team, and external developers to be on the same page about content requirements. And we knew what exactly we needed to migrate to the new site, which saved a lot of time cause CMI had over 2,500 existing articles and guides. 

Establishing the New Brand

The design was rooted in design principles that we co-created with the CMI team. We choose type families that express a friendly brand tone and are utilitarian enough to support long-form digital publishing.

We created a new color system and illustration style called 'Growth Rings' that expressed emotion while still feeling rational and bright.

A New Family Resource Center

The main focus of the project was to create a new resource portal for families to help support children who are struggling with mental health, behavior, or learning challenges.

The largest audience challenge was understanding different audience’s emotions to getting the right care. Some families are more comfortable talking about care, while others feel worried and uncertain. We created a positive ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ experience that allows people to access the right resources in different ways. 

The multiple ways for families to find the right mental health resources and care:

1

The Care Journey walks families through each stage of the process to identifying concerns to receiving clinical care

2

The symptom checker allows families to connect symptoms with resources

3. Topic Pages give a curated overview of related content groups

4. The Resource Finder is a 5 minute quiz that focuses on concerns rather than symptoms.

5

The Article and Guides have a Quick Read version that provides a ‘bite-size’ version of the full content 

6

Every Article and Guide has helpful UI components like table of contents, reading progress bar, text-to-speech tool, related resources + topics to explore more.

7

Custom Translations from the CMI Spanish Team

Making the full site multilingual was a major step into creating a more inclusive experience for Latinx families. Every page of the site is custom translated by the CMI’s Spanish team, allowing important care information to be communicated by native speakers, not an automatic AI translation.

The results speak for themselves

The new site launched September 2021 and has been praised as a success across Child Mind Institute and the families they help. The Child Mind Institute website was awarded a 2022 Webby Awards Honoree for Charitable Organizations/Non-Profit Websites and Mobile Sites

The analytics also point that the site has extensively increased its reach to more families

• Organic Traffic jumped up to a +33.15% YOY increase after the redesign.
• The Resource Center main page and Topics now have about +67% more page views than before.
• Articles have experienced a +18% increase in page views.

• The site had a +14.9% increase in the number of visits from Spanish Speaking users.

• Page loads are 31% faster

• Users are more likely to visit the Request for an Appointment form (+486% increase in views) which also shows in the increased number of conversions.

• Significant Donations conversion rate improvement (+39.88% YOY)

©2023   |   Created in Brooklyn, New York