A crisis for youth mental health
Millions of children—as many as 1 in 5—struggle with mental health or learning challenges. Since 2009, the Child Mind Institute has been a leading organization dedicated to transforming the lives of these children and families by providing evidence-based care and educational resources. They also train educators and develop breakthrough treatments so that kids and families have the support they need to thrive. Ensuring that the Child Mind Institute is accessible to families in need is essential to building long-term support for youth mental health.
Challenge
70% of U.S. counties need a child/adolescent psychiatrist. This gap in care highlights a major focus of the Child Mind Institute’s mission. In order to meet the ever-changing needs of children across the country, the Child Mind Institute wanted to expand its reach to low-income families of color in rural areas. The website, however, was largely speaking to educators, researchers, funders, and current parents and clients local to New York City and San Francisco. With a grant to create an educational website specifically for these families, the organization began to explore how they could provide care to more families and children.
DECISION POINT
Exploring a sub-brand
The Child Mind Institute believed that a sub-brand for their vast library of articles, toolkits, and parent guides would help them reach more families in rural areas. As we explored this idea further during a brand strategy workshop, we learned how important its educational content was to the brand experience, and vice versa. The organization’s existing brand made its educational resources highly credible and trusted. Creating a separate website for its educational content might damage both brands’ credibility and ability to achieve their mission.
INSIGHT
A stronger brand together
Our assessment of the brand and website revealed a key opportunity to refresh the Child Mind Institute’s full brand experience and website. For them to reach more families in communities facing geographic and systemic barriers to mental health services, the brand must provide clinical content written in a highly-accessible way, a simple user experience, and visual and verbal storytelling that builds trust and hope. And, the technical website infrastructure must be scalable while reducing technical debt, security threats, and streamlining publishing workflows.
Clinical, and still highly accessible
We redesigned the Child Mind Institute’s website to include several strategic improvements in user experience, content, and design. This would bring the two experiences together and create greater access to their resources for a wider audience.
- Simplified navigation
- Refined information architecture
- Distinct content relationships
- Accessible colors and fonts
- Multi-lingual support
- Better mobile experience
- Features to drive engagement
- Clean technical architecture
- Reduced reliance on plugins
- Seamless API integrations
- Improved publishing workflows
- Faster page load speeds
The Results
Visitors to the Website increased 25% year-over-year after launching the new website
25%↑
Overall Page Load Speeds decreased by 31% after the redesign
31%↓
Spanish Language Visitors increased by 163% after launch
163%↑
Appointment Requests increased 41% after launch
41%↑
Visits to the Request an Appointment form increased by 486% after launch
486%↑
Accessibility
- The website meets most WCAG 2.2AA standards—a major improvement from the old website’s design and color palette.
- Spanish language pages and articles are manually translated and stored in the CMS for when the user switches languages, allowing for gradual translation to happen over time.
- All articles have audio options to allow users to listen to articles.
- Users can easily self-identify if they’re interested in Care, Education, or Science with user journeys that correspond to each pathway.
Usability
- All articles feature Key Takeaways to help visitors quickly determine if the article they’re reading contains the information they’re looking for.
- Users can submit a question to “Ask an Expert” which both helps other parents with similar questions and provides new ideas for content topics for writers.
- We developed a robust taxonomy system that powers much of the content organization on the website, including over 2,000 articles, guides, and toolkits.
- The user interface and its elements were consolidated and streamlined to be used consistently across the new website.
Content
- A “Care Journey” was developed to help parents know what to expect during their experience, including their first visit and tips for helping their child prepare.
- Many page templates were consolidated and streamlined, with pre-built templates making it easy to publish many different types of content.
- The new website accommodates many different types of content, including videos, audio, simple and complex forms, downloads, and modals
- Integrations with third-party applications like Salesforce, Gravity Forms, Stripe, Docusign, Fundraise Up, and others.
My Role:
- Oversaw the development of the plan for how we would approach research, discovery, strategy, and the design of the website.
- Contributed to the brand and website assessment, helping establish a baseline for where the organization is today, where it is going in the future, and what goal progress looks like.
- Assisted with interviews, surveys, peer research, and workshops and contributed to distilling insights from the qualitative and quantitative data we had collected.
- Provided leadership, oversight, and strategy during the development of the sitemap, information architecture, and the user experience design for the responsive website.
- Served as art director for the visual design of the new website.
Other Contributors:
- The agency’s engineering team developed the website on WordPress.
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