Practice Fusion Rebrand

Inspire people across the org

Rebrands are not a simple task - the outcome and the audiences’ perception can be highly unpredictable. I did my homework and read a number of articles to understand and be able to articulate to others why a rebrand would be necessary and valuable for Practice Fusion. It was due for a rebrand, but of course, it’d come at a cost - especially because this initiative was not on the roadmap.

The design director and I initiated the project and got the C level executive team, marketing, Sales, legal, customer-facing teams, and engineering directors to hear us explain the need and value of a rebrand for the business – 30 participants in total. Given the impact this rebrand initiative would have on the company across the board, and it was not on the product roadmap, it was valuable to socialize this effort and get buy in.

WORKSHOPS

I shared a list of 6 words or “brand attributes” the design director and I came up with: Trusted, Empathetic, Empowering, Efficient, Professional, Approachable, and thankfully with discussions, everyone was on board with them. I then led 2 branding activities so people can think about how our brand could look and feel, and get them excited about re-imagining our outdated website.

Collaboration

competitive analysis

Next, I worked with the designers to document notes and collect images on how the competitors visually represented copy on their homepages/websites, and how we could visually represent our brand.

inspiration and Trends

To see how the design team could produce designs moving forward, I led a discussion to weigh pros and cons on the type of imagery used: photographs or illustrations or a combination of both.

Option 1: Have a custom photoshoot. This would would be ideal so I could art-direct images to reflect our new brand. But when asked if this could be an option, leadership said there was no budget for this.

Option 2: Create illustrations - though time-consuming, it would be a library of unique artwork that we had control over. With healthcare playing catch up to tech, and design trends and Illustrations being widely adopted, we could visually stand out and look more trendy.

With budget constraints and the goal to stand out from competitors, I was convinced that the team should explore illustrations. I along with 2 other designers each came up with a design direction.

Content strategy

Because one of our goals was updating the content on our website, the design director, researcher, and I met with the Marketing and Sales team to brainstorm ideas on what information would be meaningful based on insights and anecdotal information. We learned that customers are constantly asking about how much the product costs, and details around subscribing. The researcher and I pushed to add a “Pricing” page to the website in the spirit of transparency and in an effort to reduce the amount of customer calls by adding this information to the website. With quite a heavy effort to persuade them, leadership finally agreed to the suggestion of adding a dedicated page to show costs. 🎉

Design explorations & user testing

Round 1

I provided a list of requirements and created templates with placeholder copy for each designer to use and go through some user-testing. After each designer including myself came up with a design direction, I worked closely with the lead researcher to come up with objectives and survey questions to ask ~40 participants.

round 2

We revised our illustrations based on the key learnings from the first round by making the characters look more human. I collaborated with the researcher to come up with survey questions and we did another round of testing.

user test key learnings

Participants reacted more positively to more human-like illustrations, but they still preferred the existing directions with real images.

Buy in

Based on the clear feedback from the research, I was able to convince the stakeholders that it was important to have realistic images that not only incorporated our key learnings, but also represented our brand attributes. We were able to get a budget approved for a photoshoot and prioritized on the roadmap! 🎉 I led the art-direction including casting the models, selecting props, coming up with wardrobe, and scenes.

Marketing and Brand style guide

After the design explorations and now preparing for the shoot, part of the rebrand served as an opportunity evolve the color palette and typography to make it less ‘loud’ and outdated. I chose colors that were still familiar to Practice Fusion’s main color palette, but more professional, sophisticated, and approachable to reflect the brand attributes. I also updated components for the new marketing and brand style guide and worked with the UI engineer to implement and review them. The new styles replaced old and inconsistent components within the website. I also checked color contrast, increased touch targets to meet accessibility, while adopting some of the product’s design system styles to maintain visual consistency.

Based on the brand updates, I chose wardrobe colors to reflect the new color palette.

Feedback, iterations, and specs

With 7 selected final photos, I designed the final homepage and pricing page. The researcher and I did one more round of user testing to get feedback on taglines, copy, and the custom hero images to see which photo to go with for the big launch. One participant who was a doctor responded:

Since there was no bandwidth from the Marketing team, the director of design, researcher and myself drove most of the content on the homepage. We got feedback from an on-staff clinician to ensure the prescription examples used on the product shot were appropriate, and we also got sign offs with legal counsel. Once designs were ready, I worked directly with 3 UI engineers to implement the responsive final designs.

Before & After

(Click on each image to enlarge)